Falk: Amy Foster. To-morrow

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Books by Joseph Conrad

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•CHANCE: A Tale in Two Parts Net. iUS
•TYPHOON Net. tlj>5
•AN ODTCAST OP THE ISLANDS

iVrt, tl.35

THE INHEEITORS. (WritteD with Ford

Madox HueSet) Net. tl .S5

•LORD JIM : A Romance Net. $1 M

'YOUTH: A Narrative, and Two Other Tales

Net. $1.36

•FALK Net. $1.35

•ROMANCE. (Writl^i with Ford Madoi

HueBer) Net. tl.S5

THE POINT OF HONOR: A Military Tale

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•■TWKT LAND AND SEA Net. $1.SB

♦THE NIGGER OF THE NARCISSUS

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■ALMAYERS FOLLY Net. $1.SB

Beolu marked tlms • mty bt Ivti ii Iht lat-Utii limt
Italia edUion.Si. so Hit.

Published by Doubleday, Page & Co.

1.

1

F A L K

AMY FOSTER
TOMORROW

THREE STORIES

BY

JOSEPH CONRAD

Gabdbn Citt Vmr Yobs

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1914

comaaai, igoj, bt

nOXmLEDAY, PAOS * OOXPAirT

226003

• • •

» •

• •

• •

CONTENTS

PAGE
Falk 1

Amy Foster IBS

To-MOBBOW 215

i

FALK

A REMINISCENCE

f

* • •

• •• •.

.• •_•

FALK
A REMINISCENCE

Several of us, all more or less connected with tk^-;\
sea, were dining in a smaU river-hostelry not mor;->:
than thirty miles from London, and less than twenty
from that shallow and dangerous puddle to which
our coasting men give the grandiose name of " Ger-
man Ocean." And through the wide windows we
had a view of the Thames ; an enfilading view down
the Lower Hope Reach. But the dinner was exe-
crable, and all the feast was for the eyes.

That flavour of salt-water which for so many of
us had been the very water of life permeated our
talk. He who hath known the bitterness of the
Ocean shall have its taste forever in his mouth. But
one or two of us, pampered by the life of the land,
complained of hunger. It was impossible to swal-
low any of that stuff. And indeed there was a
strange mustiness in everything. The wooden din-
ing-room stuck out over the mud of the shore like

[8]

•-.. FALK

a lacustrine diyelling ; the planks of the floor seemeC
rotten; /u.tjficrepid old waiter tottered pathetically
to and'fifo before an antediluvian and worm-eaten
sidelj^rd ; the chipped plates might have been dis-
inicrrtd from some kitchen midden near an inhab-
'ited lake ; and the chops recalled times more ancient
.'■•still. Thcj brought forcibly to one's mind the
,■ night of ages when the primeval man, evolving the
first rudiments of cookery from his dim conscious-
ness, scorched lumps of flesh at a fire of sticks in the
company of other good fellows ; then, gorged and
happy, sat him back among the gnawed bones to
tell his artless tales of experience — the tales of hun-
ger and hunt — and of women, perhaps !

But luckily tlie wine happened to be as old as
the waiter. So, comparatively empty, but upon the
whole fairly happy, we sat back and told our artless
tales. We talked of the sea and all its works. The
sea never changes, and its works for all the talk of
men are wrapped in mystery. But we agreed that
the times were changed. And we talked of old
ships, of sea-accidents, of break -downs, dismast-
ings; and of a man who brought his ship safe to
Liverpool all the way from the River Platte under
[4]

FALK

a jury rudder. We talked of wrecks, of short ra-
tions and of heroism — or at least of what the news-
papers would have called heroism at sea — a. mani-
festation of virtues quite different from the heroism
of primitive times. And now and then falling silent
all together we gazed at the sights of the river.

A P. & O. boat passed bound down. " One gets
jolly good dinners on board these ships/' remarked
one of our band. A man with sharp eyes read out
the name on her bows: Arcadia. "What a beauti-
ful model of a ship ! " murmured some of us. She
W6U5 followed by a small cargo steamer, and the flag
they hauled down aboard while we were looking
showed her to be a Norwegian. She made an awful
lot of smoke ; and before it had quite blown away, a
high-sided, short, wooden barque, in ballast and
towed by a paddle-tug, appeared in front of the
windows. All her hands were forward busy setting
up the headgear ; and aft a woman in a red hood,
quite alone with the man at the wheel, paced the
length of the poop back and forth, with the grey
wool of some knitting work in her hands.

" German I should think,'* muttered one. " The
skipper has his wife on board," remarked another ;

FALK

and the light of the crimson sunset all ablaze behind
the London smoke, throwing a glow of Bengal light
upon the barque's spars, faded away from the Hope
Reach.

Then one of us, who had not spoken before, a
man of over fifty, that had commanded ships for a
quarter of a century, looking after the barque now
gliding far away, all black on the lustre of the river,
said:

This reminds me of an absurd episode in my life,
now many years ago, wlien I got first the command
of an iron barque, loading then in a certain Eastern
seaport. It was also the capital of an Eastern king-
dom, lying up a river as might be London lies up
this old Thames of ours. No more need be said of
the place; for this sort of thing might have hap-
pened anywhere where there are ships, skippers,
tugboats, and orphan nieces of indescribable splen-
dour. And the absurdity of the episode concerns
only me, my enemy Falk, and my friend Hermann.

There seemed to be something like peculiar em-
phasis on the words " My friend Hermann," which
caused one of us (for we had just been speaking of
heroism at sea) to say idly and nonchalantly:
[6]

FALK

** And was this Hermann a hero? "

Not at all, said our grizzled friend. No hero at
all. He was a SchifF-f iihrer : Ship-conductor.
That's how they call a Master Mariner in Germany.
I prefer our way. The alliteration is good, and
there is something in the nomenclature that gives
to us as a body the sense of corporate existence:
Apprentice, Mate, Master, in the ancient and hon-
ourable craft of the sea. As to my friend Hermann,
he might have been a consummate master of the
honourable craft, but he was called official}^ SchifF-
f iihrer, and had the simple, heavy appearance of a
well-to-do farmer, combined with the good-natured
shrewdness of a small shopkeeper. With his shaven
chin, round limbs, and heavy eyelids he did not look
like a toiler, and even less like an adventurer of the
sea. Still, he toiled upon the seas, in his own way,
much as a shopkeeper works behind his counter.
And his ship was the means by which he maintained
his growing family.

She was a heavy, strong, blunt-bowed affair,
awakening the ideas of primitive solidity, like the
wooden plough of our forefathers. And there were,
about her, other suggestions of a rustic and homely

[7]

FALK
nature. The extraordinary timber projections
which I have seen in no other vessel made her square
stem resemble the tail end of a miller's waggon.
But the four stern ports of her cabin, glazed with
six little greenish panes each, and framed in wooden
sashes painted brown, might have been tlie windows
of a cottage in the country. The tiny white cur-
tains and the greenery of flower pots beliind the
glass completed the resemblance. On one or two
occasions when passing under her stem I had de-
tected from my boat a round arm in the act of tilt-
ing a watering pot. and the bowed sleek head of a
maiden whom I shall always call Hermann's niece,
because as a matter of fact I've never heard her
name, for all my intimacy with the family.

This, however, sprang up later on. Meantime in
common with the rest of the shipping in that East-
em port, I was left In no doubt as to Hermann's no-
tions of hygienic clothing. Evidently he believed
in wearing good stout flannel next his skin. On
most days little frocks and pinafores could be seen
drying in the mizzen rigging of his ship, or a tiny
row of socks fluttering on the signal halyards ; but
once a fortnight the family washing was exhibited
[8]

FALK

in force. It covered the poop entirely. The after-
noon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activ- • /
ity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague j /
suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened hu-
manity. Trunks without heads waved at you arms
without hands; legs without feet kicked fantasti-
cally with collapsible flourishes ; and there were long
white garments that, taking the wind fairly
through their neck openings edged with lace, be-
came for a moment violently distended as by the
passage of obese and invisible bodies. On these days
you could make out that ship at a great distance
by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going on abaft
her mizzen mast.

She had her berth just ahead of me, and her
name was Diana^ — ^Diana not of Ephesus but of
Bremen. This was proclaimed in white letters a
foot long spaced widely across the stem (somewhat
like the lettering of a shop-sign) under the cottage
windows. This ridiculously unsuitable name struck
one as an impertinence towards the memory of the
most charming of goddesses; for, apart from the
fact that the old craft was physically incapable of
engaging in any sort of chase, there was a gang of

[9]

FALK

four children belonging to her. They peeped over
the rail at passing boats and occasionally dropped
various objects into them. Thus, sometime before
I knew Hermann to speak to, I received on my hat
a horrid rag-doll belonging to Hermann's eldest
daughter. However, these youngsters were upon
the whole well behaved. They had fair heads, round
eyes, round little knobby noses, and they resembled
their father a good deal.

This Diana of Bremen was a moat innocent old
ship, and seemed to know nothing of the wicked sea,
aa there are on shore households that know nothing
of the corrupt world. And the sentiments she sug-
gested were unexceptionable and mainly of a do-
mestic order. Slie was a home. All these dear chil-
dren had learned to walk on her roomy quarter-deck.
In such thoughts there is something pretty, even
touching. Their teeth, I should judge, they had
cut on the ends of her running gear. I have many
times observed the baby Hermann (Nicholas) en-
gaged in gnawing the whipping of the fore-royal
brace. Nicholas' favourite place of residence was
under the main fife-rail. Directly he was let loose
he would crawl off there, and the first seaman who
[10]

FALK

came along would bring him, carefully held aloft
in tarry hands, back to the cabin door. I fancy
there must have been a standing order to that effect.
In the course of these transportations the baby,
who was the only peppery person in the ship, tried
to smite these stalwart young German sailors on the
face.

Mrs. Hermann, an engaging, stout housewife,
wore on board baggy blue dresses with white dots.
When, as happened once or twice I caught her at an
elegant little wash-tub rubbing hard on white col-
lars, baby's socks, and Hermann's summer neck-
ties, she would blush in girlish confusion, and rais-
ing her wet hands greet me from afar with many
friendly nods. Her sleeves would be rolled up to
the elbows, and the gold hoop of her wedding ring,
glittered among the soapsuds. Her voice wac
pleasant, she had a serene brow, smooth bands of
very fair hair, and a good-humoured expression of
the eyes. She was motherly and moderately talka-
tive. When this simple matron smiled, youthful
dimples broke out on her fresh broad cheeks. Her-
mann's niece on the other hand, an orphan and very
silent, I never saw attempt a smile. This, however,

[11]

I

FALK
was not gloom on tier part but the restraint of
youthful gravity.

They had carried her about with them for the
last three years, to help with the children and be
company for Mrs. Hermann, as Hermann men-
tioned once to me. It had been very necessary while
they were all little, he had added in a vexed manner.
It was her arm and her sleek head that I had
glimpsed one morning, through the stern-windows
of the cabin, hovering over the pots of fuchsias and
mignonette; but the first time I beheld her full
length I surrendered to her propottions. They fix
her in my mind, as great beauty, great intelligence,
quickness of wit or kindness of lieart might have
made some other woman equally memorable.

With her it was form and size. It was her physi-
cal personality that had this imposing charm. She
might have been witty, intelligent, and kind to an
exceptional degree. I don't know, and this is not to
the point. All I know is that she was built on a
magnificent scale. Built is the only word. She was
constructed, she was erected, as it were, with a regal
lavishness. It staggered you to see this reckless ex-
penditure of material upon a chit of a girl. She
[IS]

FALK

was youthful and also perfectly mature, as though
she had been some fortunate immortal. She was
heavy too, perhaps, but that's nothing. It only
added to that notion of permanence. She was bare-
ly nineteen. But such shoulders! Such round
arms ! Such a shadowing forth of mighty limbs
when with three long strides she pounced across the
deck upon the overturned Nicholas — it's perfectly
indescribable ! She seemed a good, quiet girl, vigi-
lant as to Lena's needs, Gustav's tumbles, the state
of Carl's dear little nose — conscientious, hardwork-
ing, and all that. But what magnificent hair she
had! Abundant, long, thick, of a tawny colour.
It had the sheen of precious metals. She wore it
plaited tightly into one single tress hanging girl-
ishly down her back and its end reached down to
her waist. The massiveness of it surprised you.
On my word it reminded one of a club. Her face
was big, comely, of an unruffled expression. She
had a good complexion, and her blue eyes were so
pale that she appeared to look at the world with
the empty white candour of a statue. You could
not call her good-looking. It was something much
more impressive. The simplicity of her apparel,

[13]

k

FALK
the opulence of her form, her imposing stature,
and the extraordinary sense of vigorous life that
seemed to emanate from her like a perfume exhaled
bj a flower, made her beautiful with a beauty of a
rustic and olympian order. To watch her reaching
up to the clothes-line with both arms raised high
above her head, caused you to fall a musing in a
strain of pagan piety. Excellent Mrs. Hermann's
baggy cotton gowns had some sort of rudimentary
frills at neck and bottom, but this girl's print frocks
hadn't even a wrinkle ; nothing but a few straight
folds in the skirt falling to her feet, and these, when
she stood still, had a severe and statuesque quality.
She was inclined naturally to be still whether sit-
ting or standing. However, I don't mean to say

■~ she was statuesque. She was too generously alive ;

" but she could have stood for an allegoric statue of
the Earth. I don't mean the worn-out earth of our
possession, but a young Earth, a virginal planet
undisturbed by the vision of a future teeming with
the monstrous forms of life and death, clamorous
with the cruel battles of hunger and thought.

The worthy Hermann himself was not very en-
tertaining, though his English was fairly comprc
[14]

FALK

hensible. Mrs. Hermann, who always let ofF one
speech at least at me in an hospitable, cordial tone
(and in Platt-Deutsch I suppose) I could not un-
derstand. As to their niece, however satisfactory
to look upon (and she inspired you somehow with
a hopeful view as to the prospects of mankind)
she was a modest and silent presence, mostly en-
gaged in sewing, only now and then, as I observed,
falling over that work into a state of maidenly
meditation. Her aunt sat opposite her, sewing also,
with her feet propped on a wooden footstool. On
the other side of the deck Hermann and I would
get a couple of chairs out of the cabin and settle
down to a smoking match, accompanied at long in-
tervals by the pacific exchange of a few words. I
came nearly every evening. Hermann I would find
in his shirt sleeves. As soon as he returned from
the shore on board his ship he commenced operations
by taking off his coat ; then he put on his head an
embroidered round cap with a tassel, and changed
his boots for a pair of cloth slippers. Afterwards
he smoked at the cabin-door, looking at his children
with an air of civic virtue, till they got caught one
after another and put to bed in various staterooms.

[16]

FALK
Lastly, we would drink some beer in the cabin, which
was furnished with a wooden table on cross legs, and
with black straight-hacked chairs — more like a farm
kitchen than a ship's cuddy. The sea and all nauti-
cal affairs seemed very far removed from the hos-
pitahty of this exemplary family.

And I liked this because I had a rather worrying
time on board my own ship. I had been appointed
ex-ofRcio by the British Consul to take cliarge of
her after a man who had died suddenly, leaving for
the guidance of his successor some suspiciously un-
receipted bills, a few dry-dock estimates hinting at
bribery, and a quantity of vouchers for three years'
extravagant expenditure; all these mixed up to-
getlier in a dusty old violin-case lined with ruby
velvet. I found besides a large account-book,
which, when opened, hopefully turned out to my
infinite consternation to be filled with verses^page
after page of rhymed doggerel of a jovial and im-
proper character, written in the neatest minute hand
I ever did see. In the same fiddle-ca-se a photograph
of my predecessor, taken lately in Saigon, repre-
sented in front of a garden view, and in company
of a female in strange draperies, an elderly, squat,

[16]

/

FALK

rugged man of stem aspect in a clumsy suit of black
broadcloth, and with the hair brushed forward above
the temples in a manner reminding one of a boar's
tusks. Of a fiddle, however, the only trace on board
was the case, its empty husk as it were ; but of the
two last freights the ship had indubitably earned
of late, there were not even the husks left. It was
impossible to say where all that money had gone to. /
It wasn't on board. It had not been remitted home ;
for a letter from the owners, preserved in a desk
evidently by the merest accident, complained mildly
enough that they had not been favoured by a
scratch of the pen for the last eighteen months.
There were next to no stores on board, not an inch
of spare rope or a yard of canvas. The ship had
been run bare, and I foresaw no end of difficulties
before I could get her ready for sea.

As I was young then — not thirty yet — I took
myself and my troubles very seriously. The old
mate, who had acted as chief mourner at the cap-
tain's funeral, was not particularly pleased at my
coming. But the fact is the fellow was not legally
qualified for command, and the Consul was bound,
if at all possible, to put a properly certificated man

[17]

FALK

on board. As to the second mate, all I can say his

name was Tottersen, or sometliing like that. His

practice was to wear on his head, in that tropical

climate, a mangy fur cap. He was, without cscep-

j tion, the stupidest man I had ever seen on board

J ship. And he looked it too. He looked so con-

* foundedly stupid that it was a matter of surprise

for me when he answered to his name.

I drew no great comfort from their company, to
say the least of it ; while the prospect of making a
long sea passage with those two fellows was depress-
ing. And my other thoughts in solitude could not
be of a gay complexion. The crew was sickly, the
cargo was coming very slow; I foresaw I would
have lots of trouble with the charterers, and doubted
whether they would advance me enough money for
the ship's expenses. Their attitude towards me was
unfriendly. Altogether I was not getting on. I
would discover at odd times (generally about mid-
night) that I was totally inexperienced, greatly Ig-
norant of business, and hopelessly unfit for any
sort of command ; and when the steward had to be
taken to the hospital ill with choleraic symptoms I
felt bereaved of the only decent person at the after
[18]

1

FALK

end of the ship. He was fully expected to recover,
but in the meantime had to be replaced by some sort
of servant. And on the recommendation of a cer-
tain Schomberg, the proprietor of the smaller of
the two hotels in the place, I engaged a Chinaman.
Schomberg, a brawny, hairy Alsatian, and an awful
gossip, assured me that it was all right. " First-
class boy that. Came in the suite of his Excellency
Tseng the Commissioner — ^you know. His Excel-
lency Tseng lodged with me here for three weeks.''
He mouthed the Chinese Excellency at me with
great unction, though the specimen of the " suite **
did not seem very promising. At the time, however,
I did not know what an untrustworthy humbug
Schomberg was. The " boy '' might have been forty
or a hundred and forty for all you could tell —
one of those Chinamen of the death's-head type of
' face and completely inscrutable. Before the end of
the third day he had revealed himself as a confirmed
opium-smoker, a gambler, a most audacious thief,
and a first-class sprinter. When he departed at the
top of his speed with thirty-two golden sovereigns
of my own hard-earned savings it was the last straw.
I had reserved that money in case my difSculties

[19]

PALK
came to the worst. Now it was gone I felt as poor
and naked as a fakir, I clung to my ship, for all
the bother she caused nie, but what I could not bear
were the long lonely evenings in her cuddy, where
the atmosphere, made smelly by a leaky lamp, was
agitated by the snoring of the mate. That fellow
shut himself up in his stuffy cabin punctually at
eight, and made gross and revolting noises like a
water-logged trump. It was odious not to be able
fc to worry oneself in comfort on board one's owo
ship. Everything in this world, 1 reflected, even
the command of a nice little barque, may be made
a delusion and a snare for the unwary spirit of
pride in man.

From such reflections I was glad to make any es-
cape on board that Bremen Diaiia. There appar-
ently no whisper of ihe world's iniquities had ever
penetrated. And yet she lived upon the wide sea:
and the sea tragic and comic, the sea with its horrors
and its peculiar scandals, the sea peopled by men
and ruled by iron necessity is indubitably a part of
the world. But that patriarchal old tub, like some
saintly retreat, echoed nothing of it. She was world
proof. Her venerable innocence apparently had
[20]

FALK

put a restraint on the roaring lusts of the sea. And
yet I have known the sea too long to believe in Its -
respect for decency. An elemental force Is ruthlessly
frank. It may, of course, have been Hermann's
skilful seamanship, but to me It looked as if the al-
lied oceans had refrained from smasliing these high
bulwarks, unshipping the lumpy rudder, frighten-
Ing the children, and generally opening this fam-
ily's eyes out of sheer reticence. It looked like reti-
cence. The ruthless disclosure was In the end left N
for a man to make; a man strong and elemental /
enough and driven to unveil some secrets of the sea 1
by the power of a simple and elemental desire.

This, however, occurred much later, and mean-
time I took sanctuary In that serene old ship early
every evening. The only person on board that
seemed to be In trouble was little Lena, and in due
course I perceived that the health of the rag-doll
was more than delicate. This object led a sort of
** In extremis " existence In a wooden box placed
against the starboard mooring-bitts, tended and
nursed with the greatest sympathy and care by all
the children, who greatly enjoyed pulling long faces
and moving with hushed footsteps. Only the baby

[21]

FALK

— Nicholas — looked on with a cold, ruffianly leer,
as if he had belonged to another tribe altogether.
Lena perpetually sorrowed over the box, and all of
them were in deadly earnest. It was wonderful the
way these children would work up their compassion
for that bedraggled thing I wouldn't have touched
with a pair of tongs. I suppose they were exercis-
ing and developing their racial sentimentalism by
the means of that dummy. I was only surprised
that Mrs. Hermann let Lena cherish and hug that
bundle of rags to that eitent, it was so disreputably
and completely unclean. But Mrs. Hermann would
raise her fine womanly eyes from her needlework to
look on with amused sympathy, and did not seem to
Bee it, somehow, that this object of affection was a
disgrace to the ship's purity. Purity, not cleanli-
ness, is the word. It was pushed so far that I seemed
to detect in this too a sentimental excess, as if dirt
had been removed in very love. It is impossible to

I give you an idea of such a meticulous neatness. It
was as if every morning that ship had been ardu-
ously explored with — with toothbrushes. Her very
bowsprit three times a week had its toilette made
with a cake of soap and a piece of soft flannel. Ar-
[22]

FALK

rayed — ^I nrnst say arrayed — arrayed artlessly in
dazzling white paint as to wood and dark green as
to ironwork the simple-minded distribution of these
colours evoked the images of simple-minded peace^
of arcadian felicity; and the childish comedy of
disease and sorrow struck me sometimes as an abom-
inably real blot upon that ideal state.

I enjoyed it greatly, and on my part I brought
a little mild excitement into it. Our intimacy arose
from the piursuit of that thief. It was in the even-
ing, and Hermann, who, contrary to his habits, had
stayed on shore late that day, was extricating him-
self backwards out of a little gharry on the river
bank, opposite his ship, when the hunt passed.
Realising the situation as though he had eyes in his
shoulder-blades, he joined us with a leap and took
the lead. The Chinaman fled silent like a rapid
shadow on the dust of an extremely oriental road.
I followed. 4^ A long way in the rear my mate
whooped like a savage. A young moon threw a
bashful light on a plain like a monstrous waste
ground : the architectural mass of a Buddhist tem-
ple far away projected itself in dead black on the
sky. We lost the thief of course ; but in my disap-

[83]

FALK
pointment I had to admire Hermann's presence of
mind. The velocity that stodgy man developed in
the interests of a complete stranger earned my
warm gratitude — there was something truly cordial
in his exertions.

He seemed as vexed as myself at our failure, and
would hardly listen to my thanks. He said it was
" nothings," and invited me on the spot to come on
board his ship and drink a glass of beer with him.
We poked sceptically for a while amongst the
bushes, peered without conviction into a ditch or
two. There was not a sound : patches of slime glim-
mered feebly amongst the reeds. Slowly we trudged
back, drooping under the thin sickle of tlie moon,
and I heard him mutter to himself, " Himmel ! Zwei
und dreisstg Pfund ! " He was impressed by the
figure of my loss. For a long time we had ceased to
hear the mjLlc's whoops and yells.

Then he said to me, " Everybody has his troub-
les," and as we went on remarked that he would
never have known anything of mine liadn't he by an
extraordinary chance been detained on shore by
Captain Falk. He didn't like to stay late ashore —
he added with a sigh. The something doleful in his
[SI]

FALK

tone I put to his sympathy with my misfortune, of
course.

On board the Diana Mrs. Hermann's fine eyes
expressed much interest and commiseration. We
had found the two women sewing face to face under
the open skylight in the strong glare of the lamp.
Hermann walked in first, starting in the very door-
way to pull off his coat, and encouraging me with
loud, hospitable ejaculations: "Come in! This
way ! Come in, captain ! " At once, coat in hand,
he began to tell his wife all about it. Mrs. Hermann
put the palms of her plirnip hands together? I
smiled and bowed with a heavy heart : the niece got
up from her sewing to bring Hermann's slippers
and his embroidered calotte, which he assimied pon-
tifically, talking (about me) all the time. Billows
of white stuff lay between the chairs on the cabin
floor ; I caught the words " Zwei und dreissig
Pf und " repeated several times, and presently came
the beer, which seemed delicious to my throat,
parched with running and the emotions of the chase.

I didn't get away till well past midnight, long
after the women had retired. Hermann had been
trading in the East for three years or more, carry-

[26]

FALK
ing freights of rice and timber mostly. His ship
was well known in all the porta from Vladivostok to
Singapore. She was his own property. The profits
had been moderate, but the trade answered well
enough while the cliildren were small yet. In an-
other year or so he hoped he would be able to sell the
old DiOTta to a firm in Japan for a fair price. He
intended to return home, to Bremen, by mail boat,
second class, with Mrs, Hermann and the children.
He told me all this stolidly, with slow puffs at his
pipe. I was sorry when knocking the ashes out he
began to rub his eyes. I would have sat with him
till morning. WTiat had I to hurry on board my
own ship for? To face the broken rifled drawer in
my state-room. Ugh ! The very thought made me
feel unwell.

I became their daily guest, as you know. I think
that Mrs. Hermann from the first looked upon me
as a romantic person, I did not, of course, tear my
hair coram populo over my loss, and she took it for
lordly indifference. Afterwards, I daresay, I did
tell them some of my adventures — such as they were
— and they marvelled greatly at the extent of my
experience. Hermann would translate what he

FALK

thought the most striking passages. Getting up on
his legs, and as if delivering a lecture on a phenom-
enon, he addressed himself, with gestures, to the
two women, who would let their sewing sink slowly
on their laps. Meantime I sat before a glass of
Hermann's beer, trying to look modest. Mrs. Her-
mann would glance at me quickly, emit slight
** Ach's ! " The girl never made a sound. Never.
But she too would sometimes raise her pale eyes to
look at me in her unseeing gentle way. Her glance
was by no means stupid ; it beamed out soft and dif
fuse as the moon beams upon a landscape — quite
differently from the scrutinising inspection of the I
stars. You were drowned in it, and imagined your-
self to appear blurred. And yet this same glance
when turned upon Christian Falk must have been
as efficient as the searchlight of a battle-ship.

Falk wa« the other assiduous visitor on board,
but from his behaviour he might have been coming
to see the quarter-deck capstan. He certainly used
to stare at it a good deal when keeping us company
outside the cabin door, with one muscular arm
thrown over the back of the chair, and his big
shapely legs, in very tight white trousers, extended

[27]

PALK

far out and ending in a pair of black shoes as
room^' as punts. On arrival he would shake Her-
mann's hand with a mutter, bow to the women, and
take up his careless and misanthropic attitude by
our side. He departed abruptly, with a jump, go-
ing through the performance of grunts, hand-
shakes, bow, as if in a panic. Sometimes, with a
sort of discreet and convulsive effort, he approached
the women and exchanged a few low words with
them, half a dozen at most. On these occasions Her-
mann's usual stare became positively glassy and
Mrs. Hermann's kind countenance would colour up.
The girl herself never turned a hair.

Falk was a Dane or perhaps a Norwegian, I
can't tell now. At all events he was a Scandinavian
e sort, and a bloated monopolist to boot. It
is possible he was unacquainted with the word, but
he had a clear perception of the thing itself. His
tariff of charges for towing ships in and out was
the most brutally inconsiderate document of the sort
I had ever seen. He was the commander and owner
of the only tug-boat on the river, a very trim white
craft of 150 tons or more, as elegantly neat as a
yacht, with a round wheel-house rising like a glazed
[«8]

1

FALK

turret high above her sharp bows, and with one slen-
der varnished pole mast forward. I daresay there
are yet a few shipmasters afloat who remember Falk
and his tug very well. He extracted his pound and
a half of flesh from each of us merchant-skippers
with an inflexible sort of indifference which made
him detested and even feared. Schomberg used to
remark : " I won't talk about the fellow. I don't
think he has six drinks from year's end to year's end
in my place. But my advice is, gentlemen, don't
you have anything to do with him, if you can help
it."

This advice, apart from unavoidable business re-
lations, was easy to follow because Falk intruded
upon no one. It seems absurd to compare a tug-
boat skipper to a centaur : but he reminded me some-
how of an engraving in a little book I had as a boy,
which represented centaurs at a stream, and there
was one, especially in the foreground, prancing bow
and arrows in hand, with regular severe features
and an inmiense curled wavy beard, flowing down
his breast. Falk's face reminded me of that cen-
tal^. Besides, he was a composite creature. Not
•^man-horse, it is true, but a man-boat. He lived

[89]

FALK
on board his tug, which was always dashing up and
down the river from early morn till dewy eve.

In the last rays of the setting sun, you could pick
out far away down the reach his beard borne high
up on the white structure, foaming up stream to
anchor for the night. There was the white-clad
man's body, and the rich brown patch of the hair,
and nothing below the waist but the 'thwart-ship
white lines of the bridge-screens, that lead the eye
to the sharp white lines of the bows cleaving the
muddy water of the river.

Separated from his boat to me at least he seemed
incomplete. The tug herself without his head and
torso on the bridge looked mutilated as it were.
But he left her very seldom. All the time I re-
mained in harbour I saw him only twice on shore.
On the first occasion it was at my charterers, where
he came in misanthropically to gel paid for towing
out a. French barque the day before. The second
time I could hardly believe my eyes, for I beheld
him reclining under his beard in a cane-bottomed
chair in the billiard-room of Schomberg's hotel.

It was very funny to see Schomberg ignoring
him pointedly. The artificiality of it contrasted

[SCO

FALK

strongly with Falk's natural unconcern. The big
Alsatian talked loudly with his other customers, go-
ing from one little table to the other, and passing
Falk's place of repose with his eyes fixed straight
ahead. Falk sat there with an untouched glass at
his elbow. He must have known by sight and name
every white man in the room, but he never addressed
a word to anybody. He acknowledged my presence
by a drop of his eyelids, and that was all. Sprawl-
ing there in the chair, he would, now and again,
draw the pahns of both his hands down his face,
giving at the same time a slight, almost impercepti-
ble, shudder.

It was a habit he had, and of course I was per-
fectly familiar with it, since you could not remain
an hour in his company without being made to won-
der at such a movement breaking some long period
of stillness. It was a passionate and inexplicable
gesture. He used to make it at all sorts of times ;
as likely as not after he had been listening to little
Lena's chatter about the suffering doll, for instance.
The Hermann children always besieged him about
his legs closely, though, in a gentle way, he shrank
from them a little. He seemed, however, to feel a

[31]

FALK
great affection for the whole family. For Hermann
himself especially. He sought his company. In
this case, for instance, he must have been waiting
for him, because as soon as he appeared Falk rose
hastily, and they went out together. Then Schom-
berg expounded in my hearing to three or four
people his theory that Falk was after Captain Her-
mann's niece, and asserted confidently that nothing
would come of it. It was the same last year when
Captain Hermann was loading here, he said.

Naturally, I did not believe Schomberg, but I
own that for a time I observed closely what went
on. All I discovered was some impatience on Her-
i part. At the sight of Falk, stepping over
the gangway, the excellent man would begin to
mumble and chew between his t»ieth something that
sounded like German swear-words. However, as
I've said, I'm not familiar with the language, and
Hermann's soft, round-eyed countenance remained
unchanged. Staring stolidly ahead he greeted
him with, " Wie gehts," or in English, " How are
you? " with a throaty enunciation. The girl would
look up for an instant and move her lips slightly:
Mrs. Hermann let her hands rest on her lap to talk
[32]

'1

FALK

volubly to him for a minute or so in her pleasant
voice before she went on with her sewing again.
Falk would throw himself into a chair, stretch his
big legs, as like as not draw his hands down his face
passionately. As to myself, he was not pointedly
impertinent : it was rather as though he could not
be bothered with such trifles as my existence; and
the truth is that being a monopolist he was under
no necessity to be amiable. He was sure to get his
own extortionate terms out of me for towage
whether he frowned or smiled. As a matter of fact,
he did neither: but before many days elapsed he
managed to astonish me not a little and to set
Schomberg's tongue clacking more than ever.

It cam[% about in this way. There was a shallow
bar at the mouth of the river which ought to have
been kept down, but the authorities of the State
were piously busy gilding afresh the great Buddhist
Pagoda just then, and I suppose had no money to
spare for dredging operations. I don't know how
it may be now, but at the time I speak of that sand-
bank was a great nuisance to the shipping. One of
its consequences was that vessels of a certain
draught of water, like Hermann's or mine, could not

[88]

FALK

complete their loading in the river. After taking'
in as much as possible of their cargo, thej had to
go outside to fill up. The whole procedure was an
unmitigated bore. When you thought you had as
much on board as your ship could carry safely over
the bar, you went and gave notice to your agents.
They, in their turn, notified Falk that so-and-so
was ready to go out. Then Falk (ostensibly when it
fitted in with his other work, but, if the truth were
known, simply when his arbitrary spirit moved
him), after ascertaining carefully in the office that
there was enough money to meet his bill, would
come along unsympathetlcally, glaring at you with
his yellow eyes from the bridge, and would drag you
out dishevelled as to rigging, lumbered as to the
decks, with unfeeling haste, as if to execution. And
he would force you too to take the end of his own
wire hawser, for the use of which there was of course
■n extra charge. To your shouted remonstrances
ugainst that extortion this towering trunk wjth one
hand on the engine-room telegraph only shook its
bearded head above the splash, the racket, and the
clouds of smoke in which the tug, backing and fill-
ing in the smother of churning paddle-wheels be-
[31]

•^ FALK

haved like a ferocious and impatient creature. He
had her manned by the cheekiest gang of lascars I
^iwsr did see^ whom he allowed to bawl at you inso-
Vffiiy, and, once fast, he plucked you out of your
berth as if he did not care what he smashed. Eigh-
teen miles down the river you had to go behind him,
and then three more along the coast to where a
group of uninhabited rocky islets enclosed a shel-
tered anchorage. There you would have to lie at
single anchor with your naked spars showing to
seaward over these barren fragments of land scat-
tered upon a very intensely blue sea. There was
nothing to look at besides but a bare coast, the mud-
dy edge of the brown plain with the sinuosities of
the river you had left, traced in dull green, and the^
Great Pagoda uprising lonely and massive withj
shining curves and pinnacles like the gorgeous and
stony efflorescence of tropical rocks. You had .
nothing to do but to wait fretfully for the balance
of your cargo, which was sent out of the river with
the greatest irregularity. And it was open to you
to console yourself with the thought that, after all,
this stage of bother meant that your departure from
these shores was indeed approaching at last.

[86]

FALK

We both had to go tlirough that stage, Hermano
and I, and there was a sort of tacit emulation be-
tween the ships as to which should be ready first.
We kept on neck and neck almost to the finish, when
I won the race by going personally to give notice in
the forenoon ; whereas Hermann, who was very slow
in making up his mind to go ashore, did not get to
the agents' office till late in the day. They told him
there that my ship was first on turn for next morn-
ing, and I believe he told them he was in no hurry.
It suited him better to go the day after.

That evening, on board the Diana, he sat with
his plump knees well apart, staring and puffing at
the curved moutlipiccc of his pipe. Presently he
spoke with some impatience to his niece about put-
ting the children to bed. Mrs. Hermann, who was
talking to Falk, stopped short and looked at her
husband uneasily, but the girl got up at once and
drove the children before her into the cabin. In a
little while Mrs. Hermann had to leave us to quell
what, from the sounds inside, must have been a dan-
gerous mutiny. At this Hermann grumbled to him-
self. For half an hour longer Falk left alone with
us fidgeted on his chair, sighed hghtly, then at last,
[36]

PALK

after drawing his hands down his face, got up, and
as if renouncing the hope of making himself under-
stood (he hadn't opened his mouth once) he said in
English : " Well. . . . Good night. Captain Her-
mann." He stopped for a moment before my chair
and looked down fixedly ; I may even say he glared :
and he went so far as to make a deep noise in his
throat. There was in all this something so marked
that for the first time in our limited intercourse of
nods and grunts he excited in me something like
interest. But next moment he disappointed me —
for he strode away hastily without a nod even.

His manner was usually odd it is true, and I cer-
tainly did not pay much attention to it; but that
sort of obscure intention, which seemed to lurk in
his nonchalance like a wary old carp in a pond, had
never before come so near the surface. He had dis-
tinctly aroused my expectations. I would have been
unable to say what it was I expected, but at all
event^ I did not expect the absurd developments he
sprung upon me no later than the break of the very
next day.

I remember only that there was, on that evening,
enough point in his behaviour to make me, after he

[87]

1

FALK
had fled, wonder audibly what he might mean. To
this Hermann, crossing his legs with a swing and
settling himself viciously away from me in his chair,
said: "That fellow don't know himself what he
means."

There might have been some insight in such a
remark. T said notliing, and, still averted, he
added : " When I was here last year ho was just
the same." An eruption of tobacco smoke envel-
oped his head as if his temper had exploded like
gunpowder.

I had half a mind to ask him point blank whether
he, at least, didn't know why Falk, a notoriously
unsociable man, had taken to visiting his ship with
such assiduity. After all, I reflected suddenly, it
was a most remarkable tiling. I wonder now what
Hermann would have said. As it turned out he
didn't let me ask. Forgetting all about Falk ap-
parently, he started a monologue on his plans for
the future: the selling of the ship, the going home;
and falling into a reflective and calculating mood
he mumbled between regular jets of smoke about
the expense. The necessity of disbursing passage
money for all his tribe seemed to disturb him in a
[38]

FALK

manner that was the more striking because other-
wise he gave no signs of a miserly disposition. And
yet he fussed over the prospect of that voyage home
in a mail boat like a sedentary grocer who has made
up his mind to see the world. He was racially thrifty
I suppose, and for him there must have been a great
novelty in finding himself obliged to pay for travel-
ling — for sea travelling which was the normal state
of life for the family — from the very cradle for
most of them. I could see he grudged prospectively
every single shilling which must be spent so absurd-
ly. It was rather funny. He would become doleful
over it, and then again, with a fretful sigh, he would
suppose there was nothing for it now but to take
three second-class tickets — and there were the four
children to pay for besides. A lot of money that
to spend at once. A big lot of money.

I sat with him listening (not for the first time)
to these heart-searchings till I grew thoroughly
sleepy, and then I left him and turned in on board
my ship. At daylight I was awakened by a yelping
of shrill voices, accompanied by a great commotion
in the water, and the short, bullying blasts of a
steam-whistle. Falk with his tug had come for me,

[89]

FALK

I began to dress. It was remarkable that the
aDBwering noise on board my ship together with the
patter of feet above my head ceased suddenly. But
I heard more remote guttural cries which seemed to
express surprise and annoyance. Then the voice of
my mate reached me howling expostulations to
somebody at a distance. Other voices joined, ap-
parently indignant ; a chorus of something that
sounded like abuse replied. Now and then the
steam -wliistie screeched.

Altogether that unnecessary uproar was distract-
ing, but down there in my cabin I took it calmly.
In another moment, I thought, I should be going
down that wretched river, and in another week at
the most I should be totally quit of the odious place
and all the odious people in it.

Greatly cheered by the idea, I seized the hair-
brushes and looking at myself in the glass began to
use them. Suddenly a hush fell upon the noise out-
side, and I heard ( the ports of my cabin were thrown
open)- — I heard a deep calm voice, not on board my
ship, however, hailing resolutely in English, but
with a strong foreign twang, " Go ahead ! "

There may be tides in the affairs of men which
[40]

FALK

taken at the flood . . . and so on^ Personally I
am still on the look out for that important turn.
I am, however, afraid that most of us are fated to
flounder for ever in the dead water of a pool whose
shores are arid indeed. But I know that there are
often in men's affairs unexpectedly — even irration-
ally — illuminating moments when an otherwise in- •
significant sound, perhaps only some perfectly com-
monplace gesture, sufiices to reveal to us all the
unreason, all the fatuous unreason, of our compla-
cency. " Go ahead " are not particularly striking
words even when pronounced with a foreign accent ;
yet they petrified me in the very act of smiling at
myself in the glass. And then, refusing to believe
my ears, but already boiling with indignation, I
ran out of the cabin and up on deck.

It was incredibly true. It was perfectly true. I
had no eyes for anything but the Diana. It was she,
then, was being taken away. She was already out
of her berth and shooting athwart the river. " The
way this loonatic plucked that ship out is a cau-
tion," said the awed voice of my mate close to my
ear. " Hey ! Hallo ! Falk ! Hermann ! What's this
infernal trick? " I yelled in a fury.

[41]

FALK

Nobodj" hoard me. FaBc certainly could not hear
me. His tug was turning at full speed away under
the other bank. The wire hawser between her and
the Diona, stretched as taut as a harpstring,
vibrated alarmingly.

The high black craft careened over to the awful
strain. A loud crack came out of her, followed by
the tearing and splintering of wood. " There ! "
said the awed voice in my ear. " He's carried away
their towing chock." And then, with enthusiasm,
" Oh ! Look ! Look ! sir, Look ! at them Dutchmen
skipping out of the way on the forecastle. I hope
to goodness he'll break a few of their shins before
he's done with 'em."

I yelled my vain protests. The rays of the rising
sun coursing level along the plain warmed my back,
but I was hot enough with rage. I could not have
believed that a simple towing operation could sug-
gest so plainly the idea of abduction, of rape. Falk
was simply running off with the Diana.

The white tug careered out into the middle of the
river. The red floats of her paddle-wheels revolv-
ing with mad rapidity tore up the whole reach into
foam. The Diana in mid-stream waltzed round
[IS]

FALK

with as much grace as an old bam, and flew after
her ravisher. Through the ragged fog of smoke
driving headlong upon the water I had a glimpse
of Falk's square motionless shoulders under a white
hat as big as a cart-wheel, of his red face, his yel-
low staring eyes, his great beard. Instead of keep-
ing a lookout ahead, he was deliberately turning his
back on the river to glare at his tow. The tall
heavy craft, never so used before in her life, seemed
to have lost her senses ; she took a wild sheer against
her helm, and for a moment came straight at us,
menacing and clumsy, like a runaway mountain.
She piled up a streaming, hissing, boiling wave
half-way up her blunt stem, my crew let out one
great howl, — afld then we held our breaths. It was
a near thing. But Falk had her! He had her in
his clutch. I fancied I could hear the steel hawser
ping as it surged across the Diana's forecastle, with
the hands on board of her bolting away from it in
all directions. It was a near thing. Hermann, with
his hair rumpled, in a snuffy flannel shirt and a pair
of mustard-coloured trousers, had rushed to help
with the wheel. I saw his terrified round face; I
saw his very teeth uncovered by a sort of ghastly

[43]

FALK

fixed grin ; and in a great leaping tumult of water
between the two ships the Diana whisked past so
close that I could have flung a hair-brush at his
head, for, it seems, I had kept them in my hands
all the time. Meanwhile Mrs. Hermann sat placidly
on the skylight, with a woollen shawl on her shoul-
ders. The excellent woman in response to my in-
dignant gesticulations fluttered a handkerchief,
nodding and smiling in the kindest way imagina-
ble. The boys, only half-dressed, were jumping
about the poop in great glee, displaying their
gaudy braces ; and Lena in a short scarlet petticoat,
with pesiked elbows and thin bare arms, nursed the
rag-doU with devotion. The whole family passed
before my sight as if dragged across a scene of un-
paralleled violence. The last I saw was Hermann's
niece with the baby Hermann in her arms standing
apart from the others. Magnificent in her close-
fitting print frock she displayed something so com-
manding in the manifest perfection of her figure
that the sun seemed to be rising for her alone. The
flood of light brought out the opulence of her form
and the vigour of her youth in a glorifying way.
She went by perfectly motionless and as if lost in

[44]

PALK

meditation ; only the hem of her skirt stirred in the
draught; the sun rays broke on her sleek tawny
hair ; that bald-headed ruffian, Nicholas, was whack-
ing her on the shoulder. I saw his tiny fat arm
rise and fall in a workmanlike manner. And then
the four cottage windows of the Diana came into
view retreating swiftly down the river. The sashes
were up, and one of the white calico curtains was
fluttered straight out like a streamer above the agi-
tated water of the wake.

To be thus tricked out of one's turn was an un-
heard of occurrence. In my agent's office, where I
went to complain at once, they protested with apol-
ogies they couldn't understand how the mistake
arose: but Schomberg when I dropped in later to get
some tiffin, though surprised to see me, was perfect-
ly ready with an explanation. I found him seated at
the end of a long narrow table, facing his wife — a
scraggy little woman, with long ringlets and a blue
tooth, who smiled abroad stupidly and looked
frightened when you spoke to her. Between them a
waggling punkah fanned twenty cane-bottomed
chairs and two rows of shiny plates. Three China-
men in white jackets loafed with napkins in their

[46]

FALK
hnods around that desolation. Schombcrg's pet
table d'hote was not much of a success that day.
He was feeding himself ferociously and seemed to
overflow with bitterness.

He began by ordering in a brutal voice the chops
to be brought back for me, and turning in Ills chair :
" Mistake they told youP Not a bit of it ! Don't
you believe it for a moment, captain '. Falk isn't a
man to make mistakes unless on purpose." His
firm conviction was that Falk had been trying all
along to curry favour on the cheap with Hermann.
" On the cheap — mind you ! It doesn't cost him a
cent to put that insult upon you, and Captain Her-
mann gets in a day ahead of your ship. Time's
money! Eh? You are very friendly with Captain
Hermann I believe, but a man is bound to be pleased
at any little advantage he may get. Captain Her-
mann is a good business man, and there's no such
thing as a friend in business. Is there? " He
leaned forward and began to cast stealthy glances
as usual, " But Falk is, and always was, a misera-
ble fellow. I would despise him."

I muttered, grumpily, that I had no particular
respect for Falk.

[46]

FALK

" I would despise him," he insisted, with an ap-
pearance of anxiety which would have amused me
if I had not been fathoms deep in discontent. To
a young man fairly conscientious and as well-mean-
ing as only the young man can be, the current ill-
usage of life comes with a peculiar cruelty. Youth
that is fresh enough to believe in guilt, in innocence,
and in itself, will always doubt whether it have not
perchance deserved its fate. Sombre of mind and
without appetite, I struggled with the chop while
Mrs. Schomberg sat with her everlasting stupid
grin and Schomberg's talk gathered way like a slide
of rubbish.

" Let me tell you. It's all about that girl. I
don't know what Captain Hermann expects, but if
he asked me I could tell him something about Falk.
He's a miserable fellow. That man is a "perfect
slave. That's what I call him. A slave. Last
year I started this table d^hote, and sent cards out
— ^you know. You think he had one meal in the
house? Give the thing a trial? Not once. He has
got hold now of a Madras cook — ^a blamed fraud
that I hunted out of my cookhouse with a rattan.
He was not fit to cook for white men. No, not for

[47]

)

FALK

the white men's dogs either; but, see, any damned
native that can boil a pot of rice is good enough for
Mr. Falk. Rice and a little fish he buys for a few
cents from the fishing boats outside is what he lives
on. You would hardly credit it — eh? A white
man, too. . . ."

He wiped his lips, using the napkin with indig-
nation, and looking at me. It flashed through my
mind in the midst of my depression that if all the
meat in the town was like these table d'hote chops,
Falk wasn't so far wrong. I was on the point of
"saying this, but Schomberg's stare was intimidat-
ing. " He's a vegetarian, perhaps," I murmured

k

" He's a miser. A miserable miser," affirmed the
hotel-keeper with great force. " The meat here is
not so good as at home — of course. And dear too.
But look at me. I only charge a dollar for the tif-
fin, and one dollar and fifty cents for the dinner.
Show me anything cheaper. Why am I doing it?
There's little profit in this game. Falk wouldn't
look at it. I do it for the sake of a lot of young
white fellows here that hadn't a place where they
could get a decent meal and eat it decently in good
[48]

FALK

company. There's first-rate company always at
my table."

The convinced way he surveyed the empty chairs
made me feel as if I had intruded upon a tiffin of
ghostly Presences.

" A white man should eat like a white man, dash
it all," he burst out impetuously. " Ought to eat
meat, must eat meat. I manage to get meat for my
patrons all the year round. Don't I? I am not ca-
tering for a dam' lot of coolies : Have another chop,
captain. . . . No? You, boy — takeaway!"

He threw himself back and waited grimly for the
curry. The half -closed jalousies darkened the room
pervaded by the smell of fresh whitewash : a swarm i
of fiies buzzed and settled in turns, and poor Mrs.
Schomberg's smile seemed to express the quintes-
sence of all the imbecility that had ever spoken, had
ever breathed, had ever been fed on infamous buffalo
meat within these bare walls. Schomberg did not
open his lips till he was ready to thrust therein a
spoonful of greasy rice. He rolled his eyes ridicu-
lously before he swallowed the hot stuff, and only
then broke out afresh.

" It is the most degrading thing. They take the

[49]

FALK

dish up to the wheelhouise for him with a cover on it,
and he shuts both the doors before he begins to eat.
Fact ! Must be ashamed of himself. Ask the engi-
neer. He can't do without an engineer — don't you
8CC- — and eis no respectable man can be expected to
put up with such a table, he allows them fifteen dol-
lars a month extra mess money. I assure you it is
so ! You just ask.Mr. Ferdinand da Costa, That's
the engineer he has now. You may have seen him
about my place, a delicate dark young man, with
very fine eyes and a little moustache. He arrived
here a year ago from Calcutta. Between you and
me, I guess the money-lenders there must have been
after him. He rushes here for a meal every chance
he can get, for just please tell me what .satisfaction
is that for a well-educated young fellow to feed all
alone in his cabin— like a wild beast? That's what
Falk expects his engineers to put up with for fifteen
dollars extra. And the rows on board every time a
little smell of cooking gets about the deck ! You
wouldn't believe ! The otlier day da Costa got the
cook to fry a steak for him — a turtle steak it was
too, not beef at all — and the fat caught or some-
thing. Young da Costa himself was telling me of
[50]

FALK

it here in this room. * Mr. Schomberg ' — says he
* if I had let a cyUnder cover blow off through the
skylight by my negligence Captain Falk couldn't
have been more savage. He frightened the cook so
that he won't put anything on the fire for me now.'
Poor da Costa had tears in his eyes. Only try to
put yourself in his place, captain : a sensitive, gen-
tlemanly young fellow. Is he expected to eat his
food raw? But that's your Falk all over. Ask any
one you like. I suppose the fifteen dollars extra he
has to give keep on rankling — ^in there."

And Schomberg tapped his manly breast. I sat
half stunned by his irrelevant babble. Suddenly
he gripped my forearm in an impressive and cau-
tious manner, as if to lead me into a very cavern of
confidence.

** It's nothing but enviousness," he said in a low-
ered tone, which had a stimulating effect upon my
wearied hearing. " I don't suppose there is one
person in this town that he isn't envious of. I tell
you he's dangerous. Even I myself am not safe
from him. I know for certain he tried to poi-

son . . . ."

** Oh, come now," I cried, revolted,

[51]

FALK

*' But I know for certain. The people themselves
came and told me of it. He went about saying
everywhere I was a worse pest to this town than the
cholera. He had been talking against me ever since
I opened this hotel. And he poisoned Captain Her-
mann's mind too. Last time the Diana was loading
here Captain Hermann used to come in every day
for a drink or a cigar. This time be hasn't been
here twice in a week. How do you account for
that?"

He squeezed my arm till he extorted from me
some sort of mimsble.

" He makes ten times the money I do. I've
another hotel to fight against, and there is no other
tug on the river, I am not in his way, am I? He
wouldn't be fit to run an hotel if he tried. But that's
just his nature. He can't bear to think I am mak-
ing a living, I only hope it makes him properly
wretched. He's like that in everything. He
would lite to keep a decent table well enough.
But no — for the sake of a few cents. Can't do It.
It's too much for him. That's what I call being a
slave to it. But he's mean enough to kick up a row
when his nose gets tickled a bit. See that? That
[52]

PALK

just paints him. Miserly and envious. You can't
account for it any other way. Can you? I have
been studying him these three years."

He was anxious I should assent to his theory.
And indeed on thinking it over it would have been
plausible enough if there hadn't been always the
essential falseness of irresponsibility in Schom-
berg's chatter. However, I was not disposed to in-
vestigate the psychology of Falk. I was engaged
just then in eating despondently a piece of stale
Dutch cheese, being too much crushed to care what
I swallowed myself, let alone bothering my head
about Falk's ideas of gastronomy. I could expect
from their study no clue to his conduct in matters
of business, which seemed to me totally imrestrained
by morality or even by the commonest sort of de-
cency. How Insignificant and contemptible I must
appear, for the fellow to dare treat me like this — I
reflected suddenly, writhing in silent agony. And
I consigned Falk and all his peculiarities to the devil
with so much mental fervour as to forget Schom-
berg's existence, till he grabbed my arm urgently.
" Well, you may think and think till every hair of
your head falls off, captain ; but you can't explain

it in any other way,"

[68]

b

FALK

For the sake of peace and quietness I admitted
hurriedly that I couldn't; persuaded that now he
would leave off. But the only result was to make
his moist faee shine with the pride of cunning. He
removed his hand for a moment to scare a black
mass of flies off the sugar-basin and caught hold of
my arm again.

" To be sure. And in the same way everybody is
aware he would tike to get married. Only he can't.
Let me quote you an instance. Well, two j'ears ago
a Miss Vanio, a very ladylike girl, came from home
to keep house for her brother, Fred, who had an en-
gineering sliop for smaD repairs by the water side.
Suddenly Falk takes to going up to their bunga-
low after dinner, and sitting for hours in the veran-
dah saying nothing. The poor girl couldn't tell
for the life of her what to do with such a man, so she
would keep on playing the piano and singing to
him evening after evening till she was ready to
drop. And it wasn't as if she had been a strong
young woman either. She was thirty, and the cli-
mate had been playing the deuce with her. Then —
don't you know — Fred had to sit up with them for
propriety, and during whole weeks on end never got
[S4]

FALK

a single chance to get to bed before midnight.
That was not pleasant for a tired man — ^was it?
And besides Fred had worries then because his shop
didn't pay and he was dropping money fast. He
just longed to get away from here and try his luck
somewhere else, but for the sake of his sister he
hung on and on till he ran himself into debt over his
ears — ^I can tell you. I, myself, could show a hand-
ful of his chits for meals and drinks in my drawer.
I could never find out tho' where he found all the
money at last. Can't be but he must have got some-
thing out of that brother of his, a coal merchant in
Port Said. Anyhow he paid everybody before he
left, but the girl nearly broke her heart. Disap-
pointment, of course, and at her age, don't you
know. . . . Mrs. Schomberg here was very friendly
with her, and she could tell you. Awful despair.
Fainting fits. It was a scandal. A notorious scan-
dal. To that extent that old Mr. Siegers — not
your present charterer, but Mr. Siegers the father,
the old gentleman who retired from business on a
fortune and got buried at sea going home, he had
to interview Falk in his private office. He was a
man who could speak like a Dutch Uncle, and, be-

[56]

FALK
sides, Messrs. Siegers had been helping Falk with
a good bit of money from the start. In fact you
may saj they made him as far as that goes.
It BO happened that just at the time he turned up
here, their firm was chartering a lot of sailing ships
every year, and it suited their business tliat tliere
should be good towing facilities on the river. See?
. . . Well — there's always an ear at the keyhole —
isn't there? In fact," he lowered his tone confiden-
tially, " in tlu's case a good friend of mine ; a man
you can see here any evening; only they conversed
rather low. Anyhow ray friend's certain that Falk

■s trying to make all sorts of excuses, and old Mr.
Siegers was coughing a lot. And yet Falk wanted
all the time to be married too. Why ! It's notorious
the man has been longing for years to make a home
for himself. Only he can't face the expense.
When it comes to putting his hand in his pocket —
it chokes him off. That's the truth and no other.
I've always said so, and everybody agrees with me
by this time. What do you think of that — eh? "

He appealed confidently to my indignation, but
having a mind to annoy him I remarked, " that it
seemed to me very pitiful — if true."
r66]

FALK

He bounced in his chair as if I had run a pin into
him. I don't know what he might have said, only
at that moment we heard through the half open
door of the billiard-room the footsteps of two men
entering from the verandah, a murmur of two
voices; at the sharp tapping of a coin on a table
Mrs. Schomberg half rose irresolutely. " SJt still,"
he hissed at her, and then, in an hospitable^ jovial
tone, contrasting amazingly with the angry glance
that had made his wife sink in her chair, he cried
very loud : " Tiffin still going on in here, gentle-

men."

There was no answer, but the voices dropped sud-
denly. The head Chinaman went out. We heard
the clink of ice in the glasses, pouring sounds, the
shuffling of feet, the scraping of chairs. Schom-
berg, after wondering in a low mutter who the devil
could be there at this time of the day, got up napkin
in hand to peep through the doorway cautiously.
He retreated rapidly on tip-toe, and whispering be-
hind his hand informed me that it was Falk, Falk
himself who was in there, and, what's more, he had
Captain Hermann with him.

The return of the tug from the outer Roads was

[67]

FALK
unexpected but possible, for Falk had taken away
the Duma at half-past five, and it was now two
o'clock. Schomberg wished me to observe that
neither of these men would spend a dollar on a tiffin,
which they must have wanted. But by the time I
was ready to leave the dining-room Falk had gone.
I heard the last of his big boots on the planks of
the verandah. Hermann was sitting quite alone in
the large, wooden room with the two lifeless billiard
tables shrouded in striped covers, mopping his face
diligently. He wore his best go-ashore clothes, a
stiff collar, black coat, large white waistcoat, grey
trousers. A white cotton sunshade with a cane han-
dle reposed between his legs, his side whiskers were
neatly brushed, his clun had been freshly .shaved;
and he only distantly resembled the dishevelled and
terrified man in a snuffy night shirt and ignoble old
trousers I had seen in the morning hanging on to
the wheel of tlie Diana.

He gave a start at my entrance, and addressed
me at once in some confusion, but with genuine ea-
gerness. He was anxious to make it clear he had
nothing to do with what he called the " tam piz-
ness " of the morning. It was most inconvenient.
[58]

I

FALK

He had reckoned upon another day up in town to
settle his bills and sign certain papers. There were
also some few stores to come, and sundry pieces of
" my ironwork," as he called it quaintly, landed for
repairs, had been left behind. Now he would have
to hire a native boat to take all this out to the ship.
It would cost five or six dollars perhaps. He had
had no warning from Falk. Nothing. . . . He
hit the table with his dumpy fist. . . . Der ver-
fluchte Kerl came in the morning like a " tam'
ropper," making a great noise, and took him away.
His mate was not prepared, his ship was moored
fast — ^he protested it was shameful to come upon
a man in that way. Shameful ! Yet such was the
power Falk had on the river that when I suggested
in a chilling tone that he might have simply refused
to have his ship moved, Hermann was quite startled
at the idea. I never realised so well before that this
is an age of steam. The exclusive possession of a
marine boiler had given Falk the whiphand of us
all. Hermann, recovering, put it to me appealingly
that I knew very well how unsafe it was to contra-
dict that fellow. At this I only smiled distantly.
Der Kerl ! " he cried. He was sorry he had not

[69]

«

FALK

refused. He was indeed. The damage ! The dam-
age! What for all that damage! Tliere was no
occasion for damage. Did I know liow much dam-
age he had done? It gave mc a certain satisfaction
to tell him that I had heard his old waggon of a
ship crack fore and aft as she went by. " You
passed close enough to me," I added significantly.

He threw both his hands up to heaven at the rec-
ollection. One of them grasped by the middle the
white parasol, and he resembled curiously a carica-
ture of a shopkeeping citizen in one of his own Ger-
man comic papers. " Acli ! That was dangerous,"
he cried, I was amused. But directly he added
with an appearance of simplicity, " The side of
your iron ship would have been crushed in like —
like this matchbox."

" Would it? " I growled, much less amused now;
but by the time I had decided that this remark was
not meant for a dig at me he had worked himself
into a high state of resentfulness against Falk.
The inconvenience, the damage, the expense ! Gott-
ferdam ! Devil take the fellow. Behind the bar
Schomherg with a cigar in his teeth, pretended to
be writing with a pencil on a large sheet of paper ;

[60]

FALK

and as Hermann's excitement increased it made me
comfortingly aware of my own calmness and supe-
riority. But it occurred to me while I listened to
his revilings, that after all the good man had come
up in the tug. There perhaps — since he must come
to town — ^he had no option. But evidently he had
had a drink with Falk, either accepted or offered.
How was that? So I checked him by saying loftily
that I hoped he would make Falk pay for every
penny of the damage.

" That's it ! That's it ! Go for him," called out
Schomberg from the bar, flinging his pencil down
and rubbing his hands.

We ignored his noise. But Hermann's excite-
ment suddenly went off the boil as when you remove
a saucepan from the fire. I urged on his considera-
tion that he had done now with Falk and Falk's con-
founded tug. He, Hermann, would not, perhaps,
turn up again in this part of the world for years to
come, since he was going to sell the Diana at the end
of this very trip (" Go home passenger in a mail
boat," he murmured mechanically). He was there-
fore safe from Falk's malice. All he had to do was
to race off to his consignees and stop payment of

[61]

I

FALK

the towage bill before Falk had the time to get in
and lift the money.

Nothing could have been less in the spirit of my
advice than the thoughtful way in which he set
about to make his parasol stay propped against the
edge of the table.

While I watched his concentrated efforts with as-
tonishment he threw at me one or two perplexed,
half-shy glances. Then he sat down. " That's all
very well," he said reflectively.

It cannot be doubted that the man had been
thrown off his balance by being hauled out of the
harbour against his wish. His stohdity had been
profoundly stirred, else he would never have made
up his mind to ask me unexpectedly whether I had
not remarked that Falk had been casting eyes upon
his niece. " No more than myself," I answered with
literal truth. The girl was of the sort one necessa-
rily casts eyes at in a sense. She made no noise,
but she filled most satisfactorily a good bit of space.

" But you, captain, are not the same kind of
man," observed Hermann.

I was not, I am happy to say. In a position to

deny this. " What about the lady? " I could not

[62]

FALK

help asking. At this he gazed for a time into my
face, earnestly, and made as if to change the sub-
ject. I heard him beginning to mutter something
unexpected, about his children growing old enough
to require schooling. He would have to leave them
ashore with their grandmother when he took up that
new command he expected to get in Grermany.

This constant harping on his domestic arrange-
ments was funny. I suppose it must have been like
the prospect of a complete alteration in his life. An
epoch. He was going, too, to part with the Diana!
He had served in her for years. He had inherited
her. From an uncle, if I remember rightly. And
the future loomed big before him, occupying his
thought exclusively with all its aspects as on the
eve of a venturesome enterprise. He sat there
frowning and biting his lip, and suddenly he began
to fume and fret.

I discovered to my momentary amusement that
he seemed to imagine I could, should or ought,
have caused Falk in some way to pronounce him-
self. Such a hope was incomprehensible, but funny.
Then the contact with all this foolishness irritated
me. I said crossly that I had seen no symptoms,

[63]

k

FALK
but if there were any — since he, Hermann, was so
sure — then it was still worse. What pleasure Falk
found in humbugging people in just that way I
couldn't say. It was, however, my solemn duty to
varn him. It had lately, I said, come to my knowl-
edge that there was a man (not a very long time
ago either) who had been taken in just like this.

All this passed in undertones, and at this point
Schomberg, exasperated at our secrecy, went out
of the room slamming the door with a crash that
positively lifted us in our chairs. This, or else what
I had said, huffed my Hermann. He supposed, with
a contemptuous toss of his head towards the door
which trembled yet, that I had got liold of some of
that man's silly tales. It looked, indeed, as though
his mind had been thoroughly poisoned against
Schomberg. " His talcs were — they were," he re-
peated, seeking for the word — " trash," They
were trash, he reiterated, and moreover I was young

This horrid aspersion (I regret I am no longer
exposed to that sort of insult) made me huffy too.
I felt ready in my own mind to back up every asser-
tion of Schombcrg's and on any subject. In a mo-
[61]

FALK

ment, devil only knows why, Hermann and I were
looking at each other most inimically. He caught
up his hat without more ado and I gave myself the
pleasure of calling after him :

" Take my advice and make Falk pay for break-
ing up yo'ir ship. You aren't likely to get any-
thing else out of him."

When I got on board my ship later on, the old
mate, who was very full of the events of the morn-
ing, remarked :

"I saw the tug coming back from the outer Roads
just before two p.m." ( He never by any chance used
the words morning or afternoon. Always p.m. or
A.M., log-book style.) " Smart work that. Man's
always in a state of hurry. He's a regular
chucker-out, ain't he, sir.? There's a few pubs I
know of in the East-end of London that would be
all the better for one of his sort around the bar."
He chuckled at his joke. " A regular chucker-out.
Now he has fired out that Dutchman head over heels,
I suppose our turn's coming to-morrow morning."

We were all on deck at break of day (even the
sick — poor devils — ^had crawled out) ready to cast
off in the twinkling of an eye. Nothing came.

[65]

FAXK

Falk did not come. At last, when I began to think
that probably something had gone wrong in his
engine-room, we perceived the tug going by, full
pelt, down the river, as if we hadn't existed. For a
moment I entertained the wild notion that he was
going to turn round in the next reach. Afterwards
I watched his smoke appear above the plain, now
here, now there, according to the windings of the
river. It disappeared. Then without a word I
went down to breakfast, I just simply went down
to breakfast.

Not one of us uttered a sound till the mate, after
imbibing— by means of suction out of a saucer —
his second cup of tea, exclaimed : " Where the devil
is the man gone toP "

"Courting!" I shouted, with such a fiendish
laugh that the old chap didn't venture to open his
lips any more.

I started to the office perfectly calm. Calm with
excessive rage. Evidently they knew all about it
already, and they treated me to a show of conster-
nation. The manager, a soft-footed, immensely
obese man, breathing short, got up to meet me,
while all round the room the young clerks, bend-

[66]

FALK

ing over the papers on their desks, cast upward
glances in my direction. The fat man, without
waiting for my complaint, wheezing heavily and
in a tone as if he himself were incredulous, con-
veyed to me the news that Falk — Captain Falk —
had declined — ^had absolutely declined — ^to tow my
ship — ^to have anything to do with my ship — ^this
day or any other day. Never !

I did my best to preserve a cool appearance, but,
all the same, I must have shown how much taken
aback I was. We were talking in the middle of the
room. Suddenly behind my back some ass blew
his nose with great force, and at the same time an-
other quill-driver jumped up and went out on the
landing hastily. It occurred to me I was cutting
a foolish figure there. I demanded angrily to see
the principal in his private room.

The skin of Mr. Siegers' head showed dead white
between the iron grey streaks of hair lying plas-
tered cross-wise from ear to ear over the top of his
skull in the manner of a bandage. His narrow
sunken face was of an uniform and permanent ter-
ra-cotta colour, like a piece of pottery. He was
sickly, thin, and short, with wrists like a boy of ten,

[67]

PALK

But from that debile body there issued a bullying
voice, tremendously loud, harsh and resonant, as
if produced by some powerful mechanical contriv-
1 the nature of a fog-horn. I do not know
what he did with it in the private life of his home,
but in the larger sphere of business it presented the
advantage of overcoming arguments without the
slightest mental effort, by the mere volume of
sound. We had had several passages of arms. It
took mc all I knew to guard the interests of niy
owners— whom, nota bene, I had never seen — while
Siegers (who had made their acquaintance some
years before, during a business tour in Australia)
pretended to the knowledge of their innermost
minds, and, in the character of " our very good
friends," threw them perpetually at my head.

He looked at me with a jaundiced eje (there was
no love lost between us), and declared at once that
it was strange, very strange. His pronunciation
of English was so extravagant that I can't even
attempt to reproduce it. For instance, he said
" Fferie strantch." Combined with the bellowing
intonation it made the language of one's childhood
sound weirdly startling, and even if considered
[68]

FALK

purely as a kind of unmeaning noise it filled you
with astonishment at first. " They had/' he con-
tinued, " been acquainted with Captain Falk for
very many years, and never had any reason. . . ."
" That's why I come to you, of course," I inter-
rupted. " I've the right to know the meaning of
this infernal nonsense." In the half light of the
room, which was greenish, because of the tree-tops
screening the window, I saw him writhe his meagre
shoulders. It came into my head, as disconnected
ideas will come at all sorts of times into one's head,
that this, most likely, was the very room where, if
the tale were true, Falk had been lectured by Mr.
Siegers, the father. Mr. Siegers' (the son's) over-
whelming voice, in brassy blasts, as though he had
been trying to articulate his words through a trom-
bone, was expressing his great regret at a conduct
characterised by a very marked want of discre-
tion. . . As I lived I was being lectured too ! His
deafening gibberish was difficult to follow, but it
was my conduct — mine! — ^that . . . Damn! I

wasn't going to stand this.

" What on earth are you driving at? " I asked
in a passion. I put my hat on my head (he never

[69]

PALK
offered a scat to anybody), and as he seemed for
the moment struck dumb by my irreverence, I
turned my back on him and marched out. His vo-
cal arrangements blared after mc a few threats of
coming down on t]ie ship for the demurrage of the
lighters, and all the other expenses consequent
upon the delays arising from my frivolity.

Once outside in the sunshine my head swam. It
was no longer a question of mere delay. I per-
ceived myself involved in hopeless and humiliating
absurdities that were leading me to something very
like a disaster. " Let us be calm," I muttered to
myself, and ran into the shade of a leprous wall.
From that short side-street I could see the broad
main thoroughfare ruinous and gay, running
away, away between stretches of decaying mason-
ry, bamboo fences, ranges of arcades of brick and
plaster, hovels of lath and mud, lofty temple gates
of carved timber, huts of rotten mats — ^an im-
mensely wide thoroughfare, loosely packed as far
as the eye could reach with a barefooted and brown
multitude paddling ankle deep in the dust. For a
moment I felt myself about to go out of my mind
with worry and desperation.
[70]

FALK

Some allowance must be made for the feelings
of a young man new to responsibility. I thought
of my crew. Half of them were ill, and I really
began to think that some of them would end by dy-
ing on board if I couldn't get them out to sea soon.
Obviously I should have to take my ship down the
river, either working under canvas or dredging
with the anchor down; operations which, in com-
mon with many modern sailors, I only knew theo-
retically. And I almost shrank from undertaking
them shorthanded and without local knowledge
of the river bed, which is so necessary for the con-
fident handling of the ship. There were no pilots,
no beacons, no buoys of any sort; but there was a
very devil of a current for anybody to see, no end
of shoal places, and at least two obviously awkward
turns of the channel between me and the sea. But
how dangerous these turns were I would not tell. I
didn't even know what my ship was capable of!
I had never handled her in my life. A misunder-
standing between a man and his ship in a difficult
river with no room to make it up, is bound to end in
trouble for the man. On the other hand, it must
be owned I had not much reason to count upon a

£71]

FALK

general run of good luck. And suppose I had the
mbfortune to pile her up high and dry on some
beastly shoal? That would have been the final un-
doing of that voyage. It was plain that if Falk
refused to tow nie out he would also refuse to pull
mc off. Tliis meant — what? A day lost at the
very best; but more likely a. whole fortnight of
frizzling on some pestilential mudflat, of desperate
work, of discharging cargo; more than likely it
meant borrowing money at an exorbitant rate of
interest— from the Siegers' gang too at that. They
were a power in the port. And that elderly seaman
of mine, Ganibril, had looked pretty ghastly when
I went forward to dose him with quinine that morn-
ing. He would certainly die — not to speak of two
or three others that seemed nearly as bad, and of
the rest of them just ready to catch any tropical
disease going. Horror, ruin and everlasting re-
morBc. And no help. None. I had fallen amongst
B lot of unfriendly lunatics !

At any rate, if I must take my ship down myself
it was my duty to procure if possible some local
knowledge. But that was not easy. The only per-
son I could think of for that service was a certain
[72]

FALK

Johnson, formerly captain of a country ship, but
now spliced to a country wife and gone utterly to
the bad. I had only heard of him in the vaguest
way, as living concealed in the thick of two hundred
thousand natives, and only emerging into the light
of day for the purpose of hunting up some brandy.
I had a notion that if I could lay my hands on him
I would sober him on board my ship and use him
for a pilot. Better than nothing. Once a sailor
always a sailor — and he had known the river for
years. But in our Consulate (where I arrived drip-
ping after a sharp walk) they could tell me noth-
ing. The excellent young men on the staff, though
willing to help me, belonged to a sphere of the
white colony for which that sort of Johnson does
not exist. Their suggestion was that I should hunt
the man up myself with the help of the Consulate's
constable — an ex-sergeant-major of a regiment of
Hussars.

This man, whose usual duty apparently consisted
in sitting behind a little table in an outer room
of Consular offices, when ordered to assist me in
my search for Johnson displayed lots of energy
and a marvellous amount of local knowledge of a

[78]

I

FALK
sort. But he did not conceal an immense and scep-
tical contempt for the whole business. We explored
together on that afternoon an infinity of infamous
grog shops, gambling dens, opium dens. We
walked up narrow lanes where our gharry — a tiny
box of a thing on wheels, attached to a jibbing Bur-
mah pony — could by no means have passed. The
constable seemed to be on terms of scornful inti-
macy with Maltese, with Eurasians, with China-
men, with Klings, and with the sweepers attached
to a temple, with whom he talked at the gate. We
interviewed also through a grating In a mud wall
closing a blind alley an immensely corpulent Ital-
ian, who, the ex-sergeant-major remarked to me
perfunctorily, had " killed another man last year."
Thereupon he addressed him as " Antonio " and
" Old Buck," though that bloated carcase, appar-
ently more than half filling the sort of cell where-
in it sat, recalled rather a fat pig in a stye. Fa-
miliar and never unbending, the sergeant chucked
— absolutely chucked — under the chin a horribly
wrinkled and shrivelled old hag propped on a stick,
who had volunteered some sort of information : and
vith the same stolid face he kept up an tmlmated
[71]

FALK

conversation with the groups of swathed brown
women, who sat smoking cheroots on the door-steps
of a long range of clay hovels. We got out of the
gharry and clambered into dwellings airy like
packing crates, or descended into places sinister
like cellars. We got in, we drove on, we got out
again for the sole purpose, as it seemed, of looking
behind a heap of rubble. The sun declined; my
companion was curt and sardonic in his answers,
but it appears we were just missing Johnson all
along. At last our conveyance stopped once more
with a jerk, and the driver jumping down opened
the door.

A black mudhole blocked the lane. A mound of
garbage crowned with the dead body of a dog ar-
rested us not. An empty Australian beef tin
bounded cheerily before the toe of my boot. Sud-
denly we clambered through a gap in a prickly
fence. • . •

It was a very clean native compound: and the
big native woman, with bare brown legs as thick
as bedposts, pursuing on all fours a silver dollar
that came rolling out from somewhere, was Mrs.
Johnson herself. ^^ Your man's at home," said the

[76]

FALK

ex-sergeant, and stepped aside in complete and
marked indifference to anything that might follow,
Johnson — at home— stood with his back to a native
house built on posts and with its walls made of
mats. In his left hand he held a banana. Out of
the right he dealt another dollar into space. The
woman captured this one on the wing, and there
and then plumped down on the ground to look at
us with greater comfort.

My man was sallow of face, grizzled, unshaven,
muddy on elbows and back ; where the seams of his
serge coat yawned jou could see his white naked-
ness. The vestiges of a paper collar encircled his
neck. He looked at us with a grave, swaying sur-
prise. "Where do you come from?" he asked.
My heart sank. How could I have been stupid
enough to waste energy and lime for this?

But having already gone so far I approached a
little nearer and declared the purpose of my visit.
He would have to come at once with me, sleep on
board my ship, and to-morrow, with the first of the
ebb, he would give me his assistance in getting my
ship down to the sea, withoxit steam, A sis-hun-
dred-ton barque, drawing nine feet aft, I pro-
[76]

FALK

posed to give him eighteen dollars for his local
knowledge; and all the time I was speaking he
kept on considering attentively the various aspects
of the banana, holding first one side up to his eye,
then the other.

" You've forgotten to apologise," he said at last
with extreme precision. " Not being a gentleman
yourself, you don't know apparently when you in-
trude upon a gentleman. I am one. I wish you to
understand that when I am in funds I don't work,
and now ..."

I would have pronounced him perfectly sober
hadn't he paused in great concern to try and brush
a hole off the knee of his trousers.

" I have money — ^and friends. Every gentle-
man has. Perhaps you would like to know my
friend? His name is Falk. You could borrow
some money. Try to remember. F-A-L-K, Falk."
Abruptly his tone changed. " A noble heart," he
said muzzily.

" Has Falk been giving you some money? " I
asked, appalled by the detailed finish of the dark
plot.

** Lent me, my good man, not given me. Lent,"

[77]

FALK

he corrected suavely. " Met me taking the air
last evening, and being as usual anxious to oblige

Hadn't jou better go to the devil out of my

compound? "

And upon this, without other warning, he let
fly with the banana which missed my head, and took
the constable just under the left eye. He rushed
at the miserable Johnson, stammering with fury.
They fell, . . ■ But why dwell on the wretched-
ness, the breathless ness, the degradation, the aense-
lessnesH, the weariness, the ridicule and humiliation
and — and — the perspiration, of these moments? I
dragged the ex-hussar off. He was like a wild
beast. It seems he had been greatly annoyed at
losing his free afternoon on my account. The gar-
den of his bungalow required his personal atten-
tion, and at the slight blow of the banana the brute
in him had broken loose. We left Johnson on his
back, still black in the face, but beginning to kick
feebly. Meantime, the big woman had remained
sitting on the ground, apparently paralysed with
extreme terror.

For half an hour we jolted inside our rolling

box, side by side, in profound silence. The ex-ser-

[78]

1

FALK

geant was busy staunching the blood of a long
scratch on his cheek. " I hope you're satisfied," he
said suddenly. " That's what comes of all that
tomfool business. If you hadn't quarrelled with
that tugboat skipper over some girl or other, all
this wouldn't have happened."

" You heard that story?" I said.

" Of course I heard. And I shouldn't wonder if
the Consul-General himself doesn't come to hear
of it. How am I to go before him to-morrow with
that thing on my cheek — I want to know. Its
you who ought to have got this !"

After that, till the gharry stopped and he
jumped out without leave-taking, he swore to him-
self steadily, horribly; muttering great, purpose-
ful, trooper oaths, to which the worst a sailor can
do is like the prattle of a child. For my part I had
just the strength to crawl into Schomberg's coffee-
room, where I wrote at a little table a note to the
mate instructing him to get everything ready for
dropping down the river next day. I couldn't
face my ship. Well ! she had a clever sort of skip-
per and no mistake — poor thing! What a horrid
mess! I took my head between my hands. At

[79]

PALK

times the obviousness of my innocence would reduce
me to despair. What had I doncP If I had done
something to bring about the situation I should at
least have learned not to do it again. But I felt
guiltless to the point of imbecilitj. The room was
empty yet; only Sehoraberg prowled round me
goggle-eyed and with a sort of awed respectful cu-
riosity. No doubt he had set the story going him-
self; but he was a good-hearted chap, and I am
really persuaded he participated in all my troubles.
He did what he could for me. He ranged aside the
heavy matchstand, set a chair straight, pushed a
spittoon slightly with his foot — as you show small
attentions to a friend under a great sorrow —
sighed, and at last, unable to hold his tongue :

" Well ! I warned you, captain. That's what
comes of running your head against Mr. Falk.
Man'll stick at nothing."

I sat without stirring, and after surveying me
with a sort of commiseration in his eyes he burst
out in a hoarse whisper : " But for a fine lump of
a girl, she's a fine lump of a girl." He made a loud
smacking noise with his thick lips. " The finest
lump of a girl that I ever . . ." he was going on
[80]

1

FALK

with great unction, but for some reason or other
broke off. I fancied myself throwing something
at his head. " I don't blame you, captain. Hang
me if I do," he said with a patronising air.

" Thank you," I said resignedly. It was no use
fighting against this false fate. I don't know even
if I was sure myself where the truth of the matter
began. The conviction that it would end disas-
trously had been driven into me by all the succes-
sive shocks my sense of security had received. I
began to ascribe an extraordinary potency to
agents in themselves powerless. It was as if
Schomberg's baseless gossip had the power to bring
about the thing itself or the abstract enmity of
Falk could put my ship ashore.

I have already explained how fatal this last
would have been. For my further action, my
youth, my inexperience, my very real concern for
the health of my crew must be my excuse. The ac-
tion itself, when it came, was purely impulsive. It
was set in movement quite undiplomatically and
simply by Falk's appearance in the doorway.

The room was full by then and buzzing with

[81]-

FALK
Toices. I had been looked at with curiosity by
every one, but how am I to describe the sensation
produced by the appearance of Falk himself block-
ing the doorway? The tension of expectation
could be measured by the profundity of the silence
that fell upon the very click of the billiard balls.
As to Schomberg, he looked extremely frightened ;
he hated mortally any sort of row (fracas he called
it) in his establishment. Fracas was bad for busi-
ness, he affirmed; but, in truth, this specimen of
portly, middle-aged manhood was of a timid dis-
position. I don't know what, considering my pres-
ence in the place, they all hoped would come of it.
A sort of stag fight, perhaps. Or they may have
supposed Falk had come in only to annihilate me
completely. As a matter of fact, Falk had come in
because Hermann had asked himto inquire after the
precious white cotton parasol wluch, in the worry
and excitement of the previous day, he had forgot-
ten at the table where we had held our little discus-
sion.

It was this that gave me my opportunity. I

don't think I would have gone to seek Falk out.

No. I don't think so. There are limits. But there

[88]

FALK

was an opportunity and I seized it — ^I have already
tried to explain why. Now I will merely state that,
in my opinion, to get his sickly crew into the sea
air and secure a quick despatch for his ship a skip^
per would be justified in going to any length, short
of absolute crime. He should put his pride in his
pocket; he may accept confidences; explain his in-
nocence as if it were a sin ; he may take advantage
of misconceptions, of desires and of weaknesses ; he
ought to conceal his horror and other emotions,
and, if the fate of a human being, and that human
being a magnificent young girl, is strangely in-
volved — ^why, he should contemplate that fate
(whatever it might seem to be) without turning a
hair. And all these things I have done; the ex-
plaining, the listening, the pretending— even to
the discretion — ^and nobody, not even Hermann's
niece, I believe, need throw stones at me now.
Schomberg at all events needn't, since from first to
last, I am happy to say, there was not the slightest
" fracas."

Overcoming a nervous contraction of the wind-
pipe, I had managed to exclaim '^ Captain Falk ! ''
His start of surprise was perfectly genuine, but

[88]

I afi

H

^ tot-

I

FALK
afterwards he neither smiled nor scowled. He sim-
ply waited. Then, when I had said, " I must have
a talk with you," and had pointed to a chair at my
table, he moved up to me, though he didn't sit
down. Schomberg, however, witli a long tumbler
in his hand, was making towards us prudently, and
I discovered then the only sign of weakness in Falk.
He had for Schomberg a repulsion resembling that
sort of physical fear some people experience at the
sight of a toad. Perhaps to a man so essentially
and silently concentrated upon himself (though he
could talk well enough, as I was to find out
presently) the other's irrepressible loquacity, em-
bracing every human being within range of the
tongue, might have appeared unnatural, disgust-
ing, and monstrous. He suddenly gave signs of
restiveness — positively like a horse about to rear,
and, muttering hurriedly as if in great pajn, " No,
I can't stand that fellow," seemed ready to bolt.
This weakness of his gave me the advantage at the
very start. " Verandah," I suggested, as if ren-
dering him a service, and walked him out by the
arm. We stumbled over a few chairs; we had the
feeling of open space before us, and felt the fresh
[81]

FALK

breath of the river — fresh, but tainted. The Chi-
nese theatres across the water made, in the sparsely
twinkling masses of gloom an Eastern town pre-
sents at night, blazing centres of light, and of a
distant and howling uproar. I felt him become
suddenly tractable again like an animal, like a
good-tempered horse when the object that scares
him is removed. Yes. I felt in the darkness there
how tractable he was, without my conviction of his
inflexibility — ^tenacity, rather, perhaps — ^being in
the least weakened. His very arm abandoning it-
self to my grasp was as hard as marble — like a limb
of iron. But I heard a tumultuous scuffling of
boot-soles within. The unspeakable idiots inside
were crowding to the windows, climbing over each
other's backs behind the blinds, billiard cues and all.
Somebody broke a window pane, and with the sound
of falling glass, so suggestive of riot and devasta-
tion, Schomberg reeled out after us in a state of
funk which had prevented his parting with his
brandy and soda. He must have trembled like an
aspen leaf. The piece of ice in the long tumbler
he held in his hand tinkled with an effect of chat-
tering teeth. ** I beg you, gentlemen," he expost-

[85]

1

TALK

ulated thicklj. " Come ! ReaUj, now, I must in-
sist ..."

How proud I am of my presence of mind !
" Hallo," I said instantly in a loud and naive tone,
" somebody's breaking your windows, Schomberg.
Would you please tell one of your boys to bring
out here a pack of cards and a couple of lights?
And two long drinks. Will you? "

To receive an order soothed him at once. It waa
business. " Certainly," he said in an immensely
relieved tone. The night was rainy, with wander-
ing gusts of wind, and while we waited for the can-
dles Falk said, as if to justify his panic, " I don't
interfere in anybody's business. I don't give any
occasion for talk. I am a respectable man. But
this fellow is always making out something wrong,
and can never rest till he gets somebody to believe
him."

This was the first of my knowledge of Falk.
This desire of respectability, of being like every-
body else, was the only recognition he vouchsafed
to the organisation of mankind. For the rest he
might have been the member of a herd, not of a so-
ciety. Self-preservation was his only concern.
[86]

t FALK

Not selfishness, but mere self-preservation. Sel-
fishness presupposes consciousness, choice, the pres-
ence of other men ; but his instinct acted as though
he were the last of mankind nursing that law like
the only spark of a sacred fire. I don't mean to
say that living naked in a cavern would have satis-
fied him. Obviously he was the creature of the
conditions to which he was bom. No doubt self-
preservation meant also the preservation of these
conditions. But essentially it meant something
much more simple, natural, and powerful. How
shall I express it? It meant the preservation of the
five senses of his body — ^let us say — taking it in its
narrowest as well as in its widest meaning. I think
you will admit before long the justice of this judg-
ment. However, as we stood there together in the
dark verandah I had judged nothing as yet — and
I had no desire to judge — ^which is an idle practice
anyhow. The light was long in coming.

" Of course," I said in a tone of mutual under-
standing, " it isn't exactly a game of cards I want
with you."

I saw him draw his hands down his face — ^the

[87]

FALK
vague stir of the passionate and meaningless ges-
ture ; but he waited in silent patience. It was only
when the lights had been brought out that he
opened his lips. I understood his mumble to mean
that " he didn't know any game."

" Like this Schomberg and all the other fools
will have to keep off," I said tearing open the pack.
" Have you heard that we are universally supposed
to be quarrelling about a girl? You know who —
of course. I am really ashamed to ask, but is it
possible that you do me the honour to think me dan-
gerous ? "

As I said these words I felt how absurd it was
and also I felt flattered — for, really, what else
could it beP His answer, spoken in his usual dis-
passionate undertone, made it clear that it was so,
but not precisely as flattering as I supposed. He
thought me dangerous with Hermann, more than
with the girl herself; but, as to quarrelling, I saw
at once how inappropriate the word was. We had
no quarrel. Natural forces are not quarrelsome.
You can't quarrel with the wind that inc
and humiliates vou by blowing; off your hat lE
street full of people. He had no quarrel with r
[88]

FALK

Neither would a boulder, falling on my head, have
had. He fell upon me in accordance with the law
by which he was moved — ^not of gravitation, like a
detached stone, but of self-preservation. Of course
this is giving it a rather wide interpretation.
Strictly speaking, he had existed and could have
existed without being married. Yet he told me that
he had found it more and more difficult to live
alone. Yes. He told me this in his low, careless
voice, to such a pitch of confidence had we arrived
at the end of half an hour.

It took me just about that time to convince him
that I had never dreamed of marrying Hermann's
niece. Could any necessity have been more extrava-
gant? And the difficulty was the greater because
he was so hard hit that he couldn't imagine any-
body being able to remain in a state of indiflFerence.
Any man with eyes in his head, he seemed to think,
could not help coveting so much bodily magnifi-
cence. This profound belief was conveyed by the
manner he listened sitting sideways to the table and
playing absently with a few cards I had dealt to
him at random. And the more I saw into him the
more I saw of him. The wind swayed the lights

[89]

FALK

BO that his sunburnt face, whiskered to the eyes,
seemed to successively flicker crimson at me and to
go out. I saw the extraordinary breadth of the
high cheek-bones, the perpendicular style of the
features, the massive forehead, steep like a clifi^,
denuded at the top, largely uncovered at the tem-
ples. The fact is I had never before seen him with-
out his hat; but now, as if my fervour had made
him hot, he had taken it ofi^ and laid it gently on
the floor. Something peculiar in the shape and
setting of his yellow eyes gave them the provoking
silent intensity which characterised his glance.
But the face was thin, furrowed, worn; I discov-
ered that through the bush of his hair, as you may
detect the gnarled shape of a tree trunk lost in a
dense undergrowth. These overgrown cheeks were
sunken. It was an anchorite's bony head fitted with
a Capuchin's beard and adjusted to a herculean
body. I don't mean athletic. Hercules, I take it,
was not an athlete. He was a strong man, suscep-
tible to female charms, and not afraid of dirt.
And thus with Falk, who was a strong man. He
was extremely strong, just as the girl (since I
must think of them together) was magnificently at-

[90]

FALK

tractive by the masterful power of flesh and blood,
expressed in shape, in size, in attitude — ^that is by
a straight appeal to the senses. His mind mean-
time, preoccupied with respectability, quailed be-
fore Schomberg's tongue and seemed absolutely
impervious to my protestations ; and I went so far
as to protest that I would just as soon think of
marrying my mother's (dear old lady!) faithful
female cook as Hermann's niece. Sooner, I pro-
tested, in my desperation, much sooner ; but it did
not appear that he saw anything outrageous in the
proposition, and in his sceptical immobility he
seemed to nurse the argument that at all events the
cook was very, very far away. It must be said that,
just before, I had gone wrong by appealing to the
evidence of my manner whenever I called on board
the Diana. I had never attempted to approach the
girl, or to speak to her, or even to look at her in any
marked way. Nothing could be clearer. But, as
his own idea of — ^let us say — courting, seemed to
consist precisely in sitting silently for hours in the
vicinity of the beloved object, that line of argu-
ment inspired him with distrust. Staring down his
extended legs he let out a grunt — as much as to

[91]

FALK
say, " That's all very fine, but you can't throw dust
in my eyes."

At last I was exasperated into saying, " Why
don't you put the matter at rest by talking to Her-
mann? " and I added sneeringly: " You don't ex-
pect me perhaps to speak for youP '*

To this he said, very loud for him, " Would
you? "

And for the first time he lifted his head to look
at me with wonder and incredulity. He lifted his
head so sharply that there could be no mistake. I
liad touched a spring. I saw the whole extent of
my opportunity, and could hardly believe in it.

" Why. Speak to . , . Well, of course," I
proceeded very slowly, watching him with great at-
tention, for, on my word, I feared a joke. " Not,
perhaps, to the young lady herself. I can't speak
German, you know. But . . ,"

He interrupted me with the earnest assurance
that Hermann had the highest opinion of me ; and
at once I felt the need for the greatest possible
diplomacy at this juncture. So I demurred just
enough to draw him on, Falk sat up, but except
[92]

FALK

for a very noticeable enlargement of the pupils,
till the irises of his eyes were reduced to two narrow
yellow rings, his face, I should judge, was incapa-
ble of expressing excitement. " Oh, yes ! Hermann
did have the greatest . . ."

" Take up your cards. Here's Schomberg peep-
ing at us through the blind ! " I said.

We went through the motions of what might
have been a game of ^carte. Presently the intoler-
able scandalmonger withdrew, probably to inform
the people in the billiard-room that we two were
gambling on the verandah like mad.

We were not gambling, but it was a game; a
game in which I felt I held the winning cards. The
stake, roughly speaking, was the success of the voy-
age — for me ; and he, I apprehended, had nothing
to lose. Our intimacy matured rapidly, and before
many words had been exchanged I perceived that
the excellent Hermann had been making use of me.
That simple and astute Teuton had been, it seems,
holding me up to Falk in the light of a rival. I
was young enough to be shocked at so much duplic-
ity. " Did he tell you that in so many words ? " I
asked with indignation.

[98]

FALK

Hermann had not. He had given hints only;
and of course it had not taken very much to alarm
Falk; but, instead of declaring himself, ho had
taken steps to remove the family from under my in-
fluence. He was perfectly straightforward about
it — as straightforward as a tile falHng on your
head. There was no duplicity in that man; and
when I congratulated him on the perfection of his
arrangements — even to the bribing of the wretched
Johnson against me — he had a genuine movement
of protest. Never bribed. He knew the man
wouldn't work as long as he had a few cents in his
pocket to get drunk on, and, naturally (he said —
" naturally ") he let him have a dollar or two. He
was himself a sailor, he said, and anticipated the
view another sailor, like myself, was bound to take.
On the other hand, he was sure that I should have
to come to grief. He hadn't been knocking about
for the last seven years up and down that river for
nothing. It would have been no disgrace to me —
but he asserted confidently I would have had my
ship very awkwardly ashore at a spot two miles
below the Great Pagoda. . . .

And with all that he had no ill-will. That was
[91]

FALK

evident. This was a crisis in which his only object
had been to gain time — I fancy. And presently
he mentioned that he had written for some jewel-
lery, real good jewellery — ^had written to Hong-
Kong for it. It would arrive in a day or two.

" Well, then,*' I said cheerily, " everything is all
right. All you've got to do is to present it to the
lady together with your heart, and live happy ever
after."

Upon the whole he seemed to accept that view as
far as the girl was concerned, but his eyelids'
drooped. There was still something in the way.
For one thing Hermann disliked him so much. As
to me, on the contrary, it seemed as though he could
not praise me enough. Mrs. Hermann too. He
didn't know why they disliked him so. It made
everything most difficult.

I listened impassive, feeling more and more dip-
lomatic. His speech was not transparently clear.
He was one of those men who seem to live, feel,
suffer in a sort of mental twilight. But as to being
fascinated by the girl and possessed by the desire
of home life with her — it was as clear as daylight.
So much being at stake, he was afraid of putting

[96]

FALK

it to the hazard of the declaration. Besides, there
something else. And with Hermann being so
set against him . . .

" I see," I said thou glit fully, while my heart beat
fast with the excitement of my diplomacy. " I
don't mind sounding Hermann. In fact, to show
you how mistaken you were, I am ready to do all I
can for you in that way."

A light sigh escaped him. He drew his hands
down his face, and it emerged, bony, unchanged of
expression, as if all the tissues had been ossified.
All the passion was in those big brown hands. He
was satisfied. Then there was that other matter.
If there were anybody on earth it was I who could
persuade Hermann to take a reasonable view ! I
had a knowledge of the world and lots of expe-
rience. Hermann admitted this himself. And then
I was a sailor too. Falk thought that a sail-
or Tould be able to understand certain things
best. . . .

He talked as if the Hermanns had been living all

their life in a rural hamlet, and I alone had been

capable, with my practice in life, of a large and

indulgent view of certain occurrences. That was

[96]

FALK

what my diplomacy was leading me to. I began
suddenly to dislike it.

" I say, Falk," I asked quite brusquely, " you
haven't already a wife put away somewhere? "

The pain and disgust of his denial were very
striking. Couldn't I understand that he was as
respectable as any white man hereabouts; earning
his living honestly. He was suffering from my sus-
picion, and the low undertone of his voice made his
protestations sound very pathetic. For a moment
he shamed me, but, my diplomacy notwithstanding,
I seemed to develop a conscience, as if in very
truth it were in my power to decide the success of
this matrimonial enterprise. By pretending hard
enough we come to believe anything — ^anything to
our advantage. And I had been pretending, very
hard, because I meant yet to be towed safely down
the river. But through conscience or stupidity, I
couldn't help alluding to the Vanlo affair. " You
acted rather badly there. Didn't you? " was what
I ventured actually to say — for the logic of our
conduct Is always at the mercy of obscure and un-
foreseen impulses.

His dilated pupils swerved from my face, glan-

[97]

TALK

cing at the window with a sort of scared fury. We
heard behind the blinds the continuous and sudden
clicking of ivory, a jovial murmur of many voices,
and Schomberg's deep manly laugh.

" That confounded old woman of a hotel-keeper
then would never, never let it rest ! " Falk ex-
claimed. " Well, yes ! It had happened two years
ago." When it came to the point he owned he
couldn't make up his mind to trust Fred Vanlo —
no sailor, a bit of a fool too. He could not trust
him, but, to stop his row, he had lent him enough
money to pay all his debts before he left. I was
greatly surprised to hear this. Then Falk could
not be such a miser after all. So much the better
for the girl. For a time he sat silent; then he
picked up a card, and while looking at it he
said:

" You need not think of anything bad. It was
an accident. I've been unfortunate once."

" Then in heaven's name say nothing about it."

As soon as these words were out of my mouth I
fancied I had said something immoral. He shook
his head negatively. It had to be told. He con-
sidered it proper that the relations of the lady
[98]

FALK

should know. No doubt — I thought to myself —
had Miss Vanlo not been thirty and damaged by the
climate he would have found it possible to entrust
Fred Vanlo with this confidence. And then the fig-
ure of Hermann's niece appeared before my mind's
eye, with the wealth of her opulent form, her rich
youth, her lavish strength. With that powerful
and immaculate vitality, her girlish form must have
shouted aloud of life to that man, whereas poor
Miss Vanlo could only sing sentimental songs to
the strumming of a piano.

" And that Hermann hates me, I know it ! " he
cried in his undertone, with a sudden recrudescence
of anxiety. " I must tell them. It is proper that
they should know. You would say so yourself."

.He then murmured an utterly mysterious allu-
sion to the necessity for peculiar domestic arrange-
ments. Though my curiosity was excited I did not
want to hear any of his confidences. I feared he
might give me a piece of information that would
make my assumed role of match-maker odious —
however unreal it was. I was aware that he could
have the girl for the asking; and keeping down a
desire to laugh in his face, I expressed a confident

[99]

FALK
belief in mj ability to argue away Hermann's dis-
like for him. " I am sure I can make it all right,"
I said. He looked very pleased.

And when we rose not a word had been said about
towage ! Not a word ! The game was won and tlie
honour was safe. Oh! blessed wliite cotton um-
brella ! We shook hands, and I was holding myself
with difSculty from breaking into a step dance of
joy when he came back, striding all the length of
the verandah, and said doubtfully:

" I say, captain, I have your word? You — you
— won't turn round? "

Heavens! The fright he gave me. Behind liis
tone of doubt there was something desperate and
menacing. The infatuated ass. But I was equal to
the situation.

" My dear Talk," I said, beginning to he with
a glibness and effrontery that amazed me even at
the time— " confidence for confidence." (He had
made no confidences.) " I will tell you that I am
already engaged to an extremely charming girl at
home, and so you understand. . . ."

He caught my hand and wrung it in a crushing
grip.

[100]

FALK y

„ w ■*
- ^ ■■

" Pardon me. I feel it every d«y.-ftiore difficult
to live alone . . ." .-^- '

" On rice and fish," I interrupted smarfly, gig-

gling with the sheer nervousness of a daii^^ es-

<*

caped.

He dropped my hand as if it had become slid-,
denly red hot. A moment of profound silence eli-''^/ ^
sued, as though something extraordinary had hap- -'y "
pened.

" I promise you to obtain Hermann's consent,"
I faltered out at last, and it seemed to me that he
could not help seeing through that humbug-
ging promise. " If there's anything else to get
over I shall endeavour to stand by you," I conceded
further, feeling somehow defeated and overborne;
" but you must do your best yourself."

" I have been unfortunate once," he muttered
unemotionally, and turning his back on me he went
away, thumping slowly the plank floor as if his feet
had been shod with iron.

Next morning, however, he was lively enough as
man-boat, a combination of splashing and shout-
ing; of the insolent commotion below with the
steady overbearing glare of the silent head-piece

[101]

• • •

• • *

• •

• •

FALK

above. He.jEl^ed us out most unnecessarily at an
ungodly kdbcVbut it was nearly eleven in the mom-

ing bef 6ce;he brought me up a cable's length from

• •

Hermann's ship. And he did it very badly too, in
a. huAy, and nearly contriving to miss altogether

•,the.*patch of good holding ground, because, for-

• • •

•/"•iSooth, he had caught sight of Hermann's niece on
, * *• * the poop. And so did I ; and probably as soon as
he had seen her himself. I saw the modest, sleek
glory of the tawny head, and the full, grey shape
of the girlish print frock she filled so perfectly, so
satisfactorily, with the seduction of unfaltering
curves — a very n3nmph of Diana the Huntress.
And Diana the ship sat, high-walled and as solid
as an institution, on the smooth level of the water,
the most uninspiring and respectable craft upon
the seas, useful and ugly, devoted to the support
of domestic virtues like any grocer's shop on shore.
At once Falk steamed away; for there was some
work for him to do. He would return in the even-
ing.

He ranged close by us, passing out dead slow,
without a hail. The beat of the paddle-wheels re-
verberating amongst the stony islets, as if from thU

[102]

FALK

ruined walls of a vast arena, filled the anchorage
confusedly with the clapping sounds of a mighty
and leisurely applause. Abreast of Hermann's
ship he stopped the engines; and a profound si-
lence reigned over the rocks, the shore and the sea,
for the time it took him to raise his hat aloft before
the nymph of the grey print frock. I had snatched
up my binoculars, and I can answer for it she didn't
stir a limb, standing by the rail shapely and erect,
with one of her hands grasping a rope at the height
of her head, while the way of the tug carried slowly
past her the hngering and profound homage of the
man. There was for me an enormous significance
in the scene, the sense of having witnessed a solemn
declaration. The die yr&s cast. After such a man-
ifestation he couldn't back out. And I reflected
that it was nothing whatever to me now. | With a
rush of black smoke belching suddenly out of the
funnel, and a mad swirl of paddle-wheels provoking
a burst of weird and precipitated clapping, the tug
shot out of the desolate arena. fThe rocky islets
lay on the sea like the heaps of a cyclopean ruin
on a plain ; the centipedes and scorpions lurked un-
der the stones ; there was not a single blade of grass

[103]

FALK
in sight anywhere, not b single lizard sunning him-
self on a boulder by the shore. "\ When I looked
again at Hermann's ship the girl had disappeared.
I could not detect the smallest dot of a bird on the
immense sky, and the flatness of the land continued
the flatness of the sea to the naked line of the hori-
zon.

Tliis is the setting now inseparably connected
with my knowledge of Falk's misfortune. My di-
plomacy had brought me there, and now I had only
to wait the time for taking up the role of an ambas-
sador. My diplomacy was a success ; my ship was
safe; old Gambril would probably live; a feeble
sound of a tapping hammer came intermittently
from the Diatia. During the afternoon I looked
at times at the old homely ship, the faithful nurse
of Hermann's progeny, or yawned towards the dis-
tant temple of Buddha, hke a lonely hillock on the
plain, where shaven priests cherish the thoughts of
that Annihilation which is the worthy reward of us
all. Unfortunate ! He had been unfortunate once-
Well, that was not so bad as life goes. And what
the devil could be the nature of that misfortune?
I remembered that I had known a man before who
[101]

1

FALK

had declared himself to have fallen, years ago, a
victim to misfortune; but this misfortune, whose
effects appeared permanent (he looked desper-
ately hard up) when considered dispassionately,
seemed indistinguishable from a breach of trust.
Could it be something of that nature? Apart,
however, from the utter improbability that he
would offer to talk of it even to his future uncle-
in-law, I had a strange feeling that Falk's physique
unfitted him for that sort of delinquency. As the
person of Hermann's niece exhaled the profound
physical charm of feminine form, so her ador-
er's big frame embodied to my senses the hard,
straight masculinity that would conceivably kill
but would not condescend to cheat. The thing
was obvious. I might just as well have suspected
the girl of a curvature of the spine. And I per-
ceived that the sun was about to set.

The smoke of Falk's tug hove in sight, far
away at the mouth of the river. It was time for
me to assume the character of an ambassador, and
the negotiation would not be difficult except in the
matter of keeping my countenance. It was all too
extravagantly nonsensical, and I conceived that it

[106]

FALK

would be best to compose for myself a grave de-
meanour. I practised this in my boat as I went
along, but the boshfulness that came secretly upon
me the moment I stepped on the deck of the Diana
is inexplicable. As soon as we had exchanged
greetings Hermann asked me eagerly if I knew
whether Falk had found his white parasol.

" He's going to bring it to you himself directly,"
I said with great solemnity. " Meantime I am
charged with an important message for which he
begs your favourable consideration. He is in Iovp
with your niece. ..."

" Ach Sof " he hissed with an animosity that
made my assumed gravity change into the most
genuine concern. What meant this tone? And I
hurried on.

" He wishes, with your consent of course, to ask
her to marry him at once — before you leave here,
that is. He would speak to the Consul."

Hermann sat down and smoked violently. Five
minutes passed in that furious meditation, and
then, taking the long pipe out of his mouth, he
burst into a hot diatribe against Falk — against his
cnipidity, bis stupidity (a fellow that can hardly
[106]

FALK

be got to say " yes " or " no " to the simplest ques-
tion) — ^against his outrageous treatment of the
shipping in port (because he saw they were at his
mercy) — and against his manner of walking,
which to his (Hermann's) mind showed a conceit
positively unbearable. The damage to the old
Diana was not forgotten, of course, and there was
nothing of any nature said or done by Falk (even
to the last offer of refreshment in the hotel) that
did not seem to have been a cause of offence.
"Had the cheek" to drag him (Hermann) into
that coffee-room ; as though a drink from him could
make up for forty-seven dollars and fifty cents of
damage in the cost of wood alone — ^not counting
two days' work for the carpenter. Of course he
would not stand in the girl's way. He was going
home to Grermany. There were plenty of poor
girls walking about in Germany.

" He's very much in love," was all I found to
say.

" Yes," he cried. " And it is time too after mak-
ing himself and me talked about ashore the last
voyage I was here, and then now again ; coming on

[107]

FALK
board every evening unsettling the girl's mind, and
saying nothing. What sort of conduct is that? "

The seven thousand dollars the fellow was always
talking about did not, in his opinion, justify such
behaviour. Moreover, nobody had seen them. He
(Hermann) seriously doubted if there were seven
thousand cents, and the tug, no doubt, was mort-
gaged up to the top of the funnel to the firm of
Siegers. But let that pass. He wouldn't stand in
the girl's way. Her head was so turned that she
had become no good to them of late. Quite unable
even to put the children to bed without her aunt.
It was bad for the children ; they gpt unruly : anij
yesterday he actually had to give Gpstav a thrash-
ing.

For that, too, Fallc was made responsible ap-
parently. And looking at my Hermi-^n's heavy,
puffy, good-natured face, I knew he would not ex-
ert himself till greatly exasperated, and, therefore,
would thrash very hard, and being fat would resent
the necessity. How Falk had managed to turn the
girl's head was more difficult to understand. I sup-
posed Hermann would know. And then hadn't
there been Miss Vanlo? It could not be his silvery
[108]

PALK

tongue, or the subtle seduction of his manner; he
had no more of what is called " manner " than an
animal — ^which, however, on the other hand, is
never, and can never be called vulgar. Therefore
it must have been his bodily appearance, exhibiting
a virility of nature as exaggerated as his beard, and
resembling a sort of constant ruthlessness. It was
seen in the very manner he lolled in the chair. He
meant no offence, but his intercourse was charac-
terised by that sort of frank disregard of suscepti-
bilities a man of seven foot six, living in a world of
dwarfs, would naturally assume, without in the
least wishing to be unkind. But amongst men of
his own stature, or neprly, this frank use of his ad-

vantages, in such matters as the awful towage bills
for instance, caused much impotent gnashing of
teeth. When attentively considered it seemed ap-
palling at times. He was a strange beast. But
maybe women liked it. Seen in that light he was
well worth taming, and I suppose every woman at
the bottom of her heart considers herself as a tamer
of strange beasts. But Hermann arose with pre-
cipitation to carry the news to his wife. I had
barely the time^ as he made for the cabin door, to

[109]

FALK
grab him by the seat of his inexpressibles. I
begged him to wait till Falk in person had spoken
with him. There remained some small matter to
talk over, as I understood.

He sat down again at once, full of suspicion.

" What matter? " he said surlily. " I have had
enough of his nonsense. There's no matter at all,
as he knows very well ; the girl has nothing in the
world. She came to us in one thin dress when my
brother died, and I have a growing family."

" It can't be anything of that kind," I opined.
" He's desperately enamoured of your niece. I
don't know why he did not say so before. Upon
my word, I believe it is because he was afraid to
lose, perhaps, the felicity of sitting near her on
your quarter deck."

I intimated my conviction that his love was so
great as to be in a sense cowardly. The effects of
a great passion are unaccountable. It has been
known to make a man timid. But Hermann looked
at me as if I had foolishly raved; and the twilight
was dying out rapidly.

" You don't believe in passion, do jou, Her-
mann? " I said cheerily. " The passion of fear will
[110]

FALK

make a cornered rat courageous. FeJk's in a cor-
ner. He will take her off your hands in one thin
frock just as she came to you. And after ten years'
service it isn't a bad bargain," I added.

Far from taking offence, he resumed his air of
civic virtue. The sudden night came upon him
while he stared placidly along the deck, bringing
in contact with his thick lips, and taking away
again after a jet of smoke, the curved mouthpiece
fitted to the stem of his pipe. The night came
upon him and buried in haste his whiskers, his glob-
ular eyes, his pufi^y pale face, his fat knees and the
vast flat slippers on his fatherly feet. Only his
short arms in respectable white shirt-sleeves re-
mained very visible, propped up like the flippers of
a seal reposing on the strand.

" Falk wouldn't settle anything about repairs.
Told me to find out first how much wood I should
require and he would see," he remarked ; and after
he had spat peacefully in the dusk we heard over
the water the beat of the tug's floats. There is, on
a calm night, nothing more suggestive of fierce and
headlong haste than the rapid sound made by the
paddle-wheels of a boat threshing her way through

[111]

FALK
a. quiet sea ; and the approach of Falk towards his
fate seemed to be urged by an impatient and pas-
sionate desire. The engines must have been driven
to the very utmost of their revolutions. We heard
them slow down at last, and, vaguely, the white
hull of the tug appeared moving against the black
islets, whilst a slow and rhythmical clapping as of
thousands of hands rose on all sides. It ceased all
at once, just before Falk brought her up. A sin-
gle brusque splash was followed by the long drawn
rumbling of iron links running through the hawse
pipe. Then a solemn silence fell upon the Road-
stead.

" He will soon be here," I murmured, and after
that we waited for him without a word. Meantime,
raising my eyes, I beheld the glitter of a lofty sky
above the Diana's mastheads. The multitude of
stars gathered into clusters, in rows, in lines, in
masses, in groups, shone all together, unanimously
— and the few isolated ones, blazing by themselves
in the midst of dark patches, seemed to be of a su-
perior kind and of an inextinguishable nature. But
long striding footsteps were heard hastening along
the deck; the high bulwarks of the Diana made a

FALK

deeper darkness. We rose from our chairs quickly,
and FeJk, appearing before us, all in white, stood
still.

Nobody spoke at first, as though we had been
covered with confusion. His arrival was fiery, but
his white bulk, of indefinite shape and without fea-
tures, made him loom up like a man of snow.

" The captain here has been telling me . . ."
Hermann began in a homely and amicable voice;
and Falk had a low, nervous laugh. His cool, neg-
ligent undertone had no inflexions, but the strength
of a powerful emotion made him ramble in his
speech. He had always desired a home. It was
difficult to live alone, though he was not answera-
ble. He was domestic; there had been difficulties;
but since he had seen Hermann's niece he found
that it had become at last impossible to live by him-
self;' " I mean — impossible," he repeated with no
sort of emphasis and only with the slightest of
pauses, but the word fell into my mind with the
force of a new idea.

** I have not said anything to her yet," Hermann
observed quietly. And Falk dismissed this by a

That's all right. Certainly. Very proper."

[118]

((

PALK

There was a necessity for perfect frankness — iu
marrying, especially. Hermann seemed attentive,
but he seized the first opportunity to ask us into the
cabin. " And by-the-by, Falk," he said innocent-
ly, as we passed in, " the timber came to no less
than forty-seven dollars and fifty cents."

Falk, uncovering his head, lingered in the pas-
sage. " Some other time," he said ; and Hermann
nudged me angrily — I don't know why. The girl
alone in the cabin sat sewing at some distance from
the table. Falk stopped short in the doorway.
Without a word, without a sign, without the slight-
est inclination of his bony head, by the silent in-
tensity of his look alone, he seemed to lay his her-
culean frame at her feet. Her hands sank slowly
CMi her lap, and raising her clear eyes, she let her
soft, beaming glance enfold him from head to foot
like a slow and pale caress. He was very hot when
he sat down; she, with bowed head, went on with
her sewing ; her neck was very white under the light
of the lamp ; but Falk, hiding his face in the palms
of his hands, shuddered faintly. He drew them
down, even to his beard, and his uncovered eyes as-
tonished me by their tense and irrational expres-
[114]

FALK

sion — as though he had just swallowed a heavy
gulp of alcohol. It passed away while he was
binding us to secrecy. Not that he cared, but he
did not like to be spoken about ; and I looked at the
girPs marvellous, at her wonderful, at her regal
hair, plaited tight into that one astonishing and
maidenly tress. Whenever she moved her well-
shaped head it would stir stiffly to and fro on her
back. The thin cotton sleeve fitted the irreproach-
able roundness of her arm like a skin ; and her very
dress, stretched on her bust, seemed to palpitate
like a living tissue with the strength of vitality ani-
mating her body. How good her complexion was,
the outline of her soft cheek and the small convo-
luted conch of her rosy ear ! To pull her needle she
kept the little finger apart from the others; it
seemed a waste of power to see her sewing — eter-
nally sewing — ^with that industrious and precise
movement of her arm, going on eternally upon all
the oceans, under all the skies, in innumerable har-
bours. And suddenly I heard Falk's voice declare
that he could not marry a woman unless she knew
of something in his life that had happened ten
years ago. It was an accident. An unfortunate ac-

[116]

FALK

ddent. It would affect the domestic arrangements
of their home, but, once told, it need not be alluded
to again for the rest of their lives. " I should want
my wife to feel for me," he said. " It has made me
unhappy." And how could he keep the knowledge
of it to himself — he asked us — perhaps through
years and years of companionship? What sort of
companionship would that be.'' He had thought it
over. A wife must know. Then why not at once?
He counted on Hermann's kindness for presenting
the affair in the best possible light. And Her-
mann's countenance, mystified before, became very
Bour. He stole an inquisitive glance at me. I
shook my head blankly. Some people thought,
Falk went on, that such an experience changed a
man for the rest of his life. He couldn't say. It
was hard, awful, and not to be forgotten, but he
did not think himself a worse man than before.
Only he talked in his sleep now, he believed. . . .
At last I began to think he had accidentally killed
some one; perhaps a friend — his own father may-
be ; when he went on to say that probably we were
aware he never touched meat. Throughout he
spoke English, of course on my account.
[116]

PALK

He swayed forward heavily.

The girl, with her hands raised before her pale
eyes, was threading her needle. He glanced at her,
and his mighty trunk overshadowed the table,
bringing nearer to us the breadth of his shoulders,
the thickness of his neck, and that incongruous, an-
chorite head, burnt in the desert, hollowed and lean
as if by excesses of vigils and fasting. His beard
flowed imposingly downwards, out of sight, be-
tween the two brown hands gripping the edge of
the table, and his persistent glance made sombre by
the wide dilations of the pupils, fascinated.

** Imagine to yourselves," he said in his ordinary
voice, " that I have eaten man."

I could only ejaculate a faint " Ah ! " of com-
plete enlightenment. But Hermann, dazed by the
excessive shock, actually murmured, " Himmel !
What for? "

" It was my terrible misfortune to do so," said
Falk in a measured undertone. The girl, uncon-
scious, sewed on. Mrs. Hermann was absent in
one of the state-rooms, sitting up with Lena, who
was feverish; but Hermann suddenly put both his
hands up with a jerk. The embroidered calotte

[117]

FALK

fell, and, in the twinkling of an eye, he had rum-
pled his hair all ends up in a most extravagant
manner. In this etate he strove to speak; with
every effort his eyes seemed to ptart further out of
their sockets ; his head looked like a mop. He
choked, gasped, swallowed, and managed to shriek
out the one word, " Beast ! "

From that moment till Falk went out of the cab-
in the girl, with her hands folded on the work lying
in her lap, never took her eyes off him. His own,
in the blindness of his heart, darted all over the
cabin, only seeking to avoid the sight of Hermann's
raving. It was ridiculous, and was made almost
terrible by the stillness of every other person pres-
ent. It was contemptible, and was made appalling
by the man's overmastering horror of this awful
sincerity, coming to him suddenly, with the confes-
sion of such a fact. He walked with great strides ;
he gasped. He wanted to know from Falk how
dared he to come and tell him thisP Did he think
himself a proper person to be sitting in this cabin
where his wife ana chiidren lived,' Tell his niece!
Expected him to tell his niece ! His own brother's
daughter ! Shameless ! Did I ever hear tell of su<>
I 118 J

FALK

impudence? — ^he appealed to me. " This man here
ought to have gone and hidden himself out of sight
instead of . . .''

" But it's a great misfortune for me. But it's a
great misfortune for me," Falk would ejaculate
from time to time.

However, Hermann kept on running frequently
against the comers of the table. At last he lost a
slipper, and crossing his arms on his breast, walked
up with one stocking foot very close to Falk, in or-
der to ask him whether he did think there was any-
where on earth a woman abandoned enough to mate
with such a monster. "Did he? Did he? Did
he? " I tried to restrain him. He tore himself out
of my hands ; he found his slipper, and, endeavour-
ing to put it on, stormed standing on one leg —
and Falk, with a face unmoved and averted
eyes, grasped all his mighty beard in one vast
palm.

" Was it right then for me to die myself? " he
asked thoughtfully. I laid my hand on his shoul-
der.

** Gk) away," I whispered imperiously, without
any clear reason for this advice, except that I

[119]

PALK

wished to put an end to Hermann's odious noise.
" Go away,"

He looked searchinglj for a moment at Hermann
before he made a move. I left the cabin too to see
him out of the ship. But he hung about the quar-
ter-deck.

" It is my misfortune," he said in a steady
voice.

" You were stupid to blurt it out in such a man-
ner. After all, we don't hear such confidences
every day."

" What does the man mean? " he mused in deep
undertones. " Somebody had to die — but why
me? "

He remained still for a time in the dark — silent ;
almost invisible. All at once he pinned my elbows
to my sides. I felt utterly powerless in his grip,
and his voice, whispering in my ear, vibrated.

" It's worse than hunger. Captain, do you know
what that means? And I could kill then — or be
killed. I wish the crowbar had smashed my skull
ten years ago. And I've got to live now. Without
her. Do you understand? Perhaps many years.
But how? What can be done? If I had allowed
[120]

FALK

myself to look at her once I would have carried her
off before that man in my hands — ^like this."

I felt myself snatched off the deck, then suddenly
dropped — ^and I staggered backwards, feeling
bewildered and bruised. What a man! All was
still; he was gone. I heard Hermann's voice de-
claiming in the cabin, and I went in.

I could not at first make out a single word, but
Mrs. Hermann, who, attracted by the noise, had
come in some time before, with an expression of
surprise and mild disapproval depicted broadly on
her face, was giving now all the signs of profound,
helpless agitation. Her husband shot a string of
guttural words at her, and instantly putting out
one hand to the bulkhead as if to save herself from
falling, she clutched the loose bosom of her dress
with the other. He harangued the two women ex-
traordinarily, with much of his shirt hanging out of
his waistbelt, stamping his foot, turning from one
to the other, sometimes throwing both his arms to-
gether, straight up above his rumpled hair, and
keeping them in that position while he uttered a
passage of loud denunciation; at others folding
them tight across his breast — and then he hissed

[121]

PALK

with indignation, elevating his shoulders and pro-
truding his head. The girl was crying.

She had not changed her attitude. From her
steady eyes that, following Falk in his retreat, had
remained fixed wistfully on the cabin door, the
tears fell rapid, thick, on her hands, on the work in
her lap, warm and gentle like a shower in spring.
She wept without grimacing, without noise— very
touching, very quiet, witji something more of pity
than of pain in her face, as one weeps in compassion
rather than in grief — and Hermann, before her,
declaimed. I caught several times the word
" Mensch," man ; and also *' Fressen," which last I
looked up afterwards in my dictionary. It means
" Devour." Hermann seemed to be requesting an
answer of some sort from her; his whole body
awayed. She remained mute and perfectly still ;
at last his agitation gained her ; she put the palms
of her hands together, her full lips parted, no
sound came. His voice scolded shrilly, his arms
went like a windmill— suddenly he shook a thick [
fist at her. She burst out into loud sobs. He
seemed stupefied,

Mrs. Hermann rushed forward babbling rap-
£122]

FALK

idly. The two women fell on each other's necks,
and, with an arm round her niece's waist, she led her
away. Her own eyes were simply streaming, her
face was flooded. She shook her head back at me
negatively, I wonder why to this day. The girPs
head dropped heavily on her shoulder. They dis-
appeared.

Then Hermann sat down and stared at the cabin
floor.

" We don't know all the circumstances," I ven-
tured to break the silence. He retorted tartly that
he didn't want to know of any. According to his
ideas no circumstances could excuse a crime — ^and
certainly not such a crime. This was the opinion
generally received. The duty of a human being
was to starve. Falk therefore was a beast, an ani-
mal; base, low, vile, despicable, shameless, and de-
ceitful. He had been deceiving him since last year.
He was, however, inclined to think that Falk must
have gone mad quite recently; for no sane person,
without necessity, uselessly, for no earthly reason,
and regardless of another's self-respect and peace
of mind, would own to having devoured human
flesh. " Why tell? " he cried. " Who was asking

[1£3]

FALK
him?" It showed Falk's brutality because after
all he had selfishly caused him (Hermann) much
pain. He would have preferred not to know that
auch an unclean creature had been in the habit of
caressing his children. He hoped I would say noth-
ing of all this ashore, though. He wouldn't like it
to get about that he had been intimate with an
eater of men — a common cannibal. As to the scene
be had made (which I judged quite unnecessary)
he was not going to inconvenience and restrain
himself for a fellow that went about courting and.
upsetting girls' heads, while he knew all the time
that no decent housewifely girl could think of mar-
rying him. At least he (Hermann) could not con-
ceive how any girl could. Fancy Lena ! . . . No,
it was impossible. The thoughts that would come
into their heads every time they sat do^Ti to a meal.
Horrible ! Horrible !

" You are too squeamish, Hermann," I said.

He seemed to think it was eminently proper to be
squeamish if the word meant disgust at Falk's con-
duct; and turning up his eyes sentimentally be
drew my attention to the horrible fate of the victims
• — the victims of that Falk. T said that I knew
[ 1S4]

FALK

nothing about them. He seemed surprised. Could
not anybody imagine without knowing? He — for
instance — felt he would like to avenge them. But
what if — said I — there had not been any? They
might have died as it were, naturally — of starva-
tion. He shuddered. But to be eaten — after
death! To be devoured! He gave another deep
shudder, and asked suddenly, " Do you think it
is true? ''

His indignation and his personality together
would have been enough to spoil the reality of the
most authentic thing. When I looked at him I
doubted the story — ^but the remembrance of Falk's
words, looks, gestures, invested it not only with
an air of reality but with the absolute truth of
primitive passion.

" It is true just as much as you are able to make
it ; and exactly in the way you like to make it. For
my part, when I hear you clamouring about it, I
don't believe it is true at all."

And I left him pondering. The men in my boat
lying at the foot of Diana^s side ladder told me that
the captain of the tug had gone away in his gig
some tibie ago.

[1«6]

FALK

I let my fellows pull an easy stroke; because of
the heavy dew the clear sparkle of the stars seemed
to fall on me cold and wetting. There was a sense
of lurking gruesome horror somewhere in my mind,
and it was mingled with clear and grotesque
images. Schomberg's gastronomic tittle-tattle
was responsible for these; and I half hoped I
should never see Falk again. But the first thing
my anchor- watchman told me was that the captain
of the tug was on board. He had sent his boat
away and was now waiting for me in the cuddy.

He was lying full length on the stern settee, his
face buried in the cushions. I had expected to see
it discomposed, contorted, despairing. It was
nothing of the kind; it was just as I had seen it
twenty times, steady and glaring from the bridge
of the tug. It was immovably set and hungry,
dominated like the whole man by the singleness of
one instinct.

He wanted to live. He had always wanted to
live. So we all do — but in us the instinct serves a
complex conception, and in him this instinct existed
alone. There is in such simple development a gi-
gantic force, and like the pathos of ti child's naive
£186]

FALK

and uncontrolled desire. He wanted that girl, and
the utmost that can be said for him was that he
wanted that particular girl alone. I think I saw
then the obscure beginning, the seed germinating
in the soil of an unconscious heed, the first shoot
of that tree bearing now for a mature mankind the
flower and the fruit, the infinite gradation in
3hades and in flavour of our discriminating love.
He was a child. He was as frank as a child too.
He was hungry for the girl, terribly hungry, as
he had been terribly hungry for food.

Don't be shocked if I declare that in my belief
it was the same need, the same pain, the same tor-
ture. We are in his case allowed to contemplate
the foundation of all the emotions — ^that one joy
which is to live, and the one sadness at the root of
the innumerable torments. It was made plain by
the way he talked. He had never suffered so. It
was gnawing, it was fire; it was there, like this!
And after pointing below his breastbone, he made
a hard wringing motion with his hands. And I as-
sure you that, seen as I saw it with my bodily eyes,
it was anything but laughable. And again, as he
was presently to tell me (alluding to an early inci-

[127\

1

FALK

dent of the disastrous voyage when some damaged
meat had been flung overboard), he said that a
time soon came when his heart ached (that was the
expression he used), and he was ready to tear his
hair out at the thought of all that rotten beef
thrown away.

I had heard all this ; I witnessed his physical
struggles, seeing the working of the rack and hear-
ing the true voice of pain, I witnessed it all pa-
tiently, because the moment I came into the cuddy
he had called upon me to stand by him- — and this,
it seems, I had diplomatically promised.

His agitation was impressive and alarming in
the little cabin, like the floundering of a great
whale driven into a shallow cove in a coEist. He
stood up ; he flung himself down headlong ; he tried
to tear the cushion with his teeth ; and again hug-
ging it fiercely to his face ho let himself fall on the
couch. The whole ship seemed to feel the shock
of his despair ; and I contemplated with wonder the
lofty forehead, the noble touch of time on the un-
covered temples, the unchanged hungry character
of the face — so strangely ascetic and so incapable
of portraying emotion.

[188]

FALK

What should he do? He had lived by being
near her. He had sat — in the evening — I knew? —
all his life ! She sewed. Her head was bent — so.
Her head — like this — ^and her arms. Ah ! Had I
seen? Like this.

He dropped on a stool, bowed his powerful neck
whose nape was red, and with his hands stitched
the air, ludicrous, sublimely imbecile and compre-
hensible.

And now he couldn't have her? No! That was
too much. After thinking too that . . . What
had he done? What was my advice? Take her by
force? No? Mustn't he? Who was there then
to kill him? For the first time I saw one of his fea-
tures move ; a fighting teeth-baring curl of the lip.
..." Not Hermann, perhaps." He lost himself
in thought as though he had fallen out of the
world.

I may note that the idea of suicide apparently
did not enter his head for a single moment. It oc-
curred to me to ask :

" Where was it that this shipwreck of yours took
place? "

" Down south," he said vaguely with a start.

[129]

FALK

" You are not down south now," I said. " Vio-
lence won't do. They would take her away from
you in no time. And what was tlie name of the
ship ? "

" Borgmester Dahl," he said. "It was no ship-
wreck."

He seemed to be waking up by degrees from that
trance, and waking up calmed.

" Not a shipwreck? What was it.'' "

" Break down," he answered, looking more like
himself every moment. By tliis only I learned that
it was a steamer. I had till then supposed they
had been starving in boats or on a raft— or per-
haps on a barren rock.

"She did not sink then?" I asked in surprise.
He nodded. " We sighted the southern ice," he
pronounced dreamily.

" And you alone survived? "

He Bat down. " Yes. It was a terrible misfor-
tune for me. Everything went wrong. All the
men went wrong. I survived."

Remembering the things one reads of it was diffi-
cult to realise the true meaning of his answers. I
ought to have seen at once — but I did not ; so diffi-
[130]

FALK

cult is it for our minds, remembering so much, in^
structed so much, informed of so much, to get in
touch with the real actuality at our elbow. And
with my head full of preconceived notions as to
how a case of " cannibalism and suffering at sea '*
should be managed I said — ^^ You were then so
lucky in the drawing of lots? "

" Drawing of lots? " he said. " What lots? Do
you think I would have allowed my life to go for
the drawing of lots? "

Not if he could help it, I perceived, no matter
what other life went.

" It was a great misfortune. Terrible. Awful,"
he said. " Many heads went wrong, but the best
men would live."

" The toughest, you mean," I said. He consid-
ered the word. Perhaps it was strange to him,
though his English was so good.

" Yes," he asserted at last. " The best. It was
everybody for himself at last and the ship open to
all."

Thus from question to question I got the whole
story. I fancy it was the only way I could that
night have stood by him. Outwardly at least he

[ 181 ]

FALK
was himself again ; the first sign of it was the re-
turn of that incongruous trick he had of drawing
both his hands down his face—and it had its mean-
ing now, with that slight shudder of the frame and
the passionate anguish of these hands uncovering
a hungry immovable face, the wide pupils of the
intent, silent, fascinating eyes.

It was an iron steamer of a most respectable ori-
gin. Tlie burgomaster of Falk's native town had
built her. She was the first steamer ever launched
there. The burgomaster's daughter had christened
her. Country people drove in carts from miles
around to see her. He told me all this. He got the
berth as what we should call a chief mate. He
seemed to tliink it had been a feather in his cap;
and, in his own corner of the world, this lover of
life was of good parentage.

The burgomaster had advanced ideas in the
ship-owning line. At that time not every one
would have known enough to think of despatching
a cargo steamer to the Pacific. But he loaded her
with pitch-pine deals and sent her off to hunt for
her luck. Wellington was to be the first port, I
fancy. It doesn't matter, because in latitude 44°
[132]

FALK

south and somewhere halfway between Good Hope
and New Zealand the tail shaft broke and the pro-
peller dropped off.

They were steaming then with a fresh gale on
the quarter and all their canvas set, to help the en-
gines. But by itself the sail power was not enough
to keep way on her. When the propeller went the
ship broached-to at once, and the masts got
whipped overboard.

The disadvantage of being dismasted consisted
in this, that they had nothing to hoist flags on to
make themselves visible at a distance. In the
course of the first few days several ships failed to
sight them ; and the gale was drifting them out of
the usual track. The voyage had been, from the
first, neither very successful nor very harmonious.
There had been quarrels on board. The captain
was a clever, melancholic man, who had no unusual
grip on his crew. The ship had been amply pro-
visioned for the passage, but, somehow or other,
several barrels of meat were found spoiled on open-
ing, and had been thrown overboard soon after
leaving home, as a sanitary measure. Afterwards
the crew of the Borgmester DaU thought of that

[188]

FALK

rotten carrion with tears of regret, covetousness
and despair.

She drove south. To begin with, there had been
an appearance of organisation, but soon tlie bonds
of discipKne became relaxed. A sombre idleness
succeeded. Thej looked with sullen eyes at the hori-
zon. The gales increased: she lay in the trough,
the seas made a clean breach over her. On one
frightful night, when they expected their hulk to
turn over with them every moment, a heavy sea
broke on board, deluged the store-rooms and spoiled
the best part of the remaining provisions. It seems
the hatch liad not been properly secured. This in-
stance of neglect is characteristic of utter discour-
agement. Falk tried to inspire some energy into
his captain, but failed. From that time he retired
more into himself, always trying to do his utmost
in the situation. It grew worse. Gale succeeded
gale, with black mountains of water hurling them-
selves on the Borgmeater Daht. Some of the men
never left their bunks; many became quarrelsome.
The chief engineer, an old man, refused to speak
at all to anybody. Others shut themselves up in
their berths to cry. On calm days the inert steamer
[131]

FALK

rolled on a leaden sea under a murky sky, or
showed, in sunshine, the squalor of sea waifs, the
dried white salt, the rust, the jagged broken
places. Then the gales came again. They kept
body and soul together on short rations. Once, an
English ship, scudding in a storm, tried to stand
by them, heaving-to pluckily under their lee. The
seas swept her decks; the men in oilskins clinging
to her rigging looked at them, and they made des-
perate signs over their shattered bulwarks. Sud-
denly her main-topsail went, yard and all, in a ter-
rific squall; she had to bear up under bare poles,
and disappeared.

Other ships had spoken them before, but at first
they had refused to be taken off, expecting the as-
sistance of some steamer. There were very few
steamers in those latitudes then; and when they
desired to leave this dead and drifting carcase, no
ship came in sight. They had drifted south out of
men's knowledge. They failed to attract the atten-
tion of a lonely whaler, and very soon the edge of
the polar ice-cap rose from the sea and closed the
southern horizon like a waU. One morning they
were alarmed by finding themselves floating

[136]

FALK
amongst detached pieces of ice. But the fear of
sinking passed away like their vigour, like their
hopes ; the shocks of the floes knocking against the
ship's side could not rouse them from their apathy :
and the Borgmester Dahl drifted out again un-
harmed into open water. They hardly noticed
the change.

The funnel had gone overboard in one of the
heavy rolls; two of their three boats had disap-
peared, washed away in bad weather, and the davits
swung to and fro, unsecured, with chafed rope's
ends waggling to the roll. Nothing was done on
board, and Falk told me how he had often listened
to the water washing about the dark engine-room
where the engines, stilled for ever, were decaying
slowly into a mass of rust, as the stilled heart de-
cays within the lifeless body. At first, after the
loss of the motive power, the tiller had been thor-
oughly secured by lashings. But in course of time
these had rotted, chafed, rusted, parting one by
one : and the rudder, freed, banged heavily to and
fro night and day, sending dull shocks through the
whole frame of the vessel. This was dangerous.
Nobody cared enough to lift a little finger. He
[136]

n

FALK

told me that even now sometimes waking up at
night, he fancied he could hear the dull vibrating
thuds. The pintles carried away, and it dropped
off at last.

The final catastrophe came with the sending off
of their one remaining boat. It was Falk who had
managed to preserve her intact, and now it was
agreed that some of the hands should sail away into
the track of the shipping to procure assistance.
She was provisioned with all the food they could
spare for the six who were to go. They waited for
a fine day. It was long in coming. At last one
morning they lowered her into the water.

Directly, in that demoralised crowd, trouble
broke out. Two men who had no business there
had jumped into the boat under the pretence of
unhooking the tackles, while some sort of squabble
arose on the deck amongst these weak, tottering
spectres of a ship's company. The captain, who
had been for days living secluded and unapproach-
able in the chart-room, came to the rail. He or-
dered the two men to come up on board and men-
aced them with his revolver. They pretended to
obey, but suddenly cutting the boat's painter, gave

;;i87]

FALK

a shove against the ship's side and made read}' to
hoist the sail.

" Shoot, sir ! Shoot them down ! " cried Falk —
"and I will jump overboard to regain the boat."
But the captain, after taking aim with an irreso-
lute arm, turned suddenly away.

A howl of rage arose. Falk dashed into his cabin
for his own pistol. When he returned it was too
late. Two more men had leaped into the water, but
the fellows in the boat beat them off with the oars,
hoisted the boat's lug and sailed away. They were
never heard of again.

Consternation and despair possessed the remain-
ing ship's company, till the apathy of utter hope-
lessness re-asserted its sway. That day a fireman
committed suicide, running up on deck with hia
throat cut from ear to ear, to the horror of all
hands. He was thrown overboard. The captain
had locked himself in the chart-room, and Falk,
knocking vainly for admittance, heard him recit-
ing over and over again the names of his wife and
children, not as if calling upon them or commend-
ing them to God, but in a mechanical voice like an
exercise of memory. Next day the doors of the
[138]

FALK

chart-room were swinging open to the roll of the
ship, and the captain had disappeared. He must
during the night have jumped into the sea. Falk
locked both the doors and kept the keys.

The organised life of the ship had come to an
end. The solidarity of the men had gone. They
became indifferent to each other. It was Falk who
took in hand the distribution of such food as re-
mained. They boiled their boots for soup to eke
out the rations, which only made their hunger more
intolerable. Sometimes whispers of hate were
heard passing between the languid skeletons that
drifted endlessly to and fro, north and south, east
and west, upon that carcase of a ship.

And in this lies the grotesque horror of this som-
bre story. The last extremity of sailors, overtaking
a small boat or a frail craft, seems easier to bear,
because of the direct danger of the seas. The con-
fined space, the close contact, the imminent menace
of the waves, seem to draw men together, in spite
of madness, suffering and despair. But there was
a ship — safe, convenient, roomy: a ship with beds,
bedding, knives, forks, comfortable cabins, glass
and china, and a complete cook's galley, pervaded,

[189]

FALK

ruled and possessed by the pitiless spectre of star-
vation. The lamp oil had been drunk, the wicks
cut up for food, the candles eaten. At night she
floated dark in all her recesses, and full of fears.
One day Falk came upon a man gnawing a splinter
of pine wood. Suddenly he threw the piece of wood
away, tottered to the rail, and fell over. Falk, too
late to prevent the act, saw him claw the ship's
side desperately before he went down. Next day
another man did the same thing, after uttering hor-
rible imprecations. But this one somehow man-
aged to get hold of the broken rudder chains and
hung on there, silently, Falk set about trying to
save him, and all the time the man, holding with
both hands, looked at him anxiously with hia sunken
eyes. Then, just as Falk was ready to put his hand
on him, the man let go his hold and sank like a
stone. Falk reflected on these sights. His heart
revolted against the horror of death, and he said
to himself that he would struggle for every pre-
cious minute of his life.

One afternoon — as the survivors lay about on

the after deck — the carpenter, a tall man with a

black beard, spoke of the last sacrifice. There was

[UO]

FALK

nothing eatable left on board. Nobody said a
word to this ; but that company separated quickly,
these listless feeble spectres slunk off one by one
to hide in fear of each other. Falk and the car-
penter remained on deck together. Falk liked
the big carpenter. He had been the best man of
the lot, helpful and ready as long as there was
anything to do, the longest hopeful, and had
preserved to the last some vigour and decision of
mind.

They did not speak to each other. Henceforth
no voices were to be heard conversing sadly on
board that ship. After a time the carpenter tot-
tered away forward; but later on, Falk going to
drink at the fresh-water pump, had the inspiration
to turn his head. The carpenter had stolen upon
him from behind, and, summoning all his strength,
was aiming with a crowbar a blow at the back of
his skull.

Dodging just in time, Falk made his escape and
ran into his cabin. While he was loading his re-
volver there, he heard the sound of heavy blows
struck upon the bridge. The locks of the chart-
room doors were slight, they flew open, and the car-

[141]

FALK

penter, posseasing himself of the captain's revolver,
fired a shot of defiance.

Falk was about to go on deck and have it out
at once, when he remarked that one of the ports of
his cabin commanded the approaches to the fresh-
water pump. Instead of going out he remained in
and secured the door. " The best man shall sur-
vive," he said to himself— and the other, he rea-
soned, must at some time or other come there to
drink. These starving men would drink often to
cheat the pangs of their hunger. But the carpen-
ter too must have noticed the position of the port.
They were the two best men in the ship, and the
game was with them. All the rest of the day Falk
saw no one and heard no sound. At night he
strained his eyes. It was dark — lie heard a rustling
noise once, but he was certain that no one could
have come near the pump. It was to the left of hia
deck port, and he could not have failed to see a
man, for the night was clear and starry. He saw
nothing; towards morning another faint noise
made him suspicious, Deliberately and quietly he
unlocked his door. He had not slept, and had not
[142]

FALE

given way to the horror of the situation. He
wanted to live.

But during the night the carpenter, without at
all trjring to approach the pump, had managed to
creep quietly along the starboard bulwark, and,
unseen, had crouched down right under Falk's deck
port. When daylight came he rose up suddenly,
looked in, and putting his arm through the round
brass framed opening, fired at Falk within a foot.
He missed — and Falk, instead of attempting to
seize the arm holding the weapon, opened his door
unexpectedly, and with the muzzle of his long re-
volver nearly touching the other's side, shot him
dead.

The best man had survived. Both of them had
at the beginning just strength enough to stand on
their feet, and both had displayed pitiless resolu-
tion, endurance, cunning and courage — all thej
qualities of classic heroism. At once Falk threw:
overboard the captain's revolver. He was a bom
monopolist. Then after the report of the two*
shots, followed by a profound silence, there crept
out into the cold^ cruel dawn of Antarctic regions^^,

[148]

FALK
from various hiding-places, over the deck of that
dismantled corpse of a ship floating on a grej sea
ruled by iron necessity and with a heart of ice —
there crept into view one by one, cautious, slow, ea-
ger, glaring, and unclean, a band of hungry and
livid skeletons. Falk faced them, the possessor of
the only fire-arm on board, and the second best man
— the carpenter— was lying dead between him and
them.

" He was eaten, of course," I said.

He bent his head slowly, shuddered a little, draw-
ing his hands over his face, and said, " I had never
any quarrel with that man. But there were our
lives between him and me."

Why continue the story of that ship, that story
before which, with its fresh-water pump like a
spring of death, its man with the weapon, the sea
ruled by iron necessity, its spectral band swayed by
terror and hope, its mute and unhearing heaven? —
the fable of the Flying Dutchman with its conven-
tion of crime and its sentimental retribution fades
like a graceful wreath, like a wisp of white mist.
What is there to say that every one of us cannot
guess for himself? I believe Falk began by
[144]

>y going

FALK

through the ship, revolver in hand ^ to annex all the ';
matches. Those starving wretches had plenty of
matches ! He had no mind to have the ship set on
fire under his feet, either from hate or from despair.
He lived in the open, camping on the bridge, com-
manding all the after deck and the only approach
to the pump. He lived! Some of the others lived
too — concealed, anxious, coming out one by one
from their hiding-places at the seductive sound of
a shot. And he was not selfish. They shared, but
only three of them all were alive when a whaler, re-
turning from her cruising ground, nearly ran over
the water-logged hull of the Borgmester Dahl^
which, it seems, in the end had in some way sprung
a leak in both her holds, but being loaded with deals
could not sink.

" They all died," Falk said. " These three too,
afterwards. But I would not die. All died, all!
under this terrible misfortune. But was I too to
throw away my life? Could I? Tell me, captain.^
I was alone there, quite alone, just like the others.
Each man was alone. Was I to give up my re-
volver? Who to? Or was I to throw it into the
sea? What would have been the good? Only the

[145]

FALK

best man would survive. It was a great, terrible,
and cruel misfortune."

He had survived ! I saw him before me as
though preserved for a witness to the mighty truth
of an unerring and eternal principle. Great beads
of perspiration stood on his forehead. And sud-
denly it struck the table with a heavy blow, as he
fell forward throwing his hands out.

" And this is worse," he cried. " This is a worse
pain ! This is more terrible."

He made my heart thump with the profound con-
viction of his cries. And after he had left me
alone I called up before my mental eye the image
of the girl weeping silently, abundantly, patiently,
and as if irresistibly. I thought of her tawny
hair. I thought how, if unplaited, it would have
covered her all round as low as the hips, like the
hair of a siren. And she had bewitched him. Fancy
a man who would guard his own life with the in-
flexibility of a pitiless and immovable fate, being
brought to lament that once a crowbar had missed
his skull! The sirens sing and lure to death, but
this one had been weeping silently as if for the pity
of his life. She was the tender and voiceless siren
[146]

FALK

of this appalling navigator. He evidently wanted
to live his whole conception of life. Nothing else
would do. And she too was a servant of that life
that, in the midst of death, cries aloud to our senses.
She was eminently fitted to interpret for him its
feminine side. And in her own way, and with her
own profusion of sensuous charms, she also seemed
to illustrate the eternal truth of an unerring prin-
ciple. I don't know though what sort of principle
Hermann illustrated when he turned up early on
board my ship with a most perplexed air. It
struck me, however, that he too would do his best
to survive. He seemed greatly calmed on the sub-
ject of Falk, but still very full of it.

" What is it you said I was last night? You
know," he asked after some preliminary talk.
" Too — too — I don't know. A very funny word.'*

" Squeamish? " I suggested.

" Yes. What does it mean? "

" That you exaggerate things — ^to yourself.
Without inquiry, and so on."

He seemed to turn it over in his mind. We went
on talking. This Falk was the plague of his life.
Upsetting everybody like this! Mrs. Hermann

[147]

FALK

was unwell rather this morning. His niece was
crying still. There was nobody to look after the
children. He struck his umbrella on the deck. She
would be like that for months. Fancy carrying all
the way home, second class, a perfectly useless girl
who is crying all the time. It was bad for Lena
too, he observed ; but on what grounds I could not
guess. Perhaps of the bad example. That child
was already sorrowing and crying enough over the
rag doll. Nicholas was really the least sentimental
person of the family.

" Why does she weep ? " I asked.

" From pity," cried Hermann.

It was impossible to make out women. Mrs. Her-
mann was the only one he pretended to understand.
She was very, very upset and doubtful.

" Doubtful about what? " I asked.

He averted his eyes and did not answer this. It
was impossible to make them out. For instance,
his niece was weeping for Falk. Now he (Her-
mann) would like to wring his neck— but then . . .
Ho supposed he had too tender a heart. " Frank-
ly," he asked at last, " what do you think of what
we heard last night, captain? "
[148]

FALK

" In all these tales," I observed, " there is always
a good deal of exaggeration."

And not letting him recover from his surprise I
assured him that I knew all the details. He begged
me not to repeat them. His heart was too tender.
They made him feel unwell. Then, looking at his
feet and speaking very slowly, he supposed that he
need not see much of them after they were married.
For, indeed, he could not bear the sight of Falk.
On the other hand it was ridiculous to take home a
girl with her head turned. A girl that weeps all
the time and is of no help to her aunt.

" Now you will be able to do with one cabin only
on your passage home," I said.

" Yes, I had thought of that," he said brightly,
almost. " Yes ! Himself, his wife, four children
— one cabin might do. Whereas if his niece
went . . ."

"And what does Mrs. Hermann say to it?" I
inquired.

Mrs. Hermann did not know whether a man of
that sort could make a girl happy— she had been
greatly deceived in Captain Falk. She had been
very upset last night.

[149]

FALK

Those good people did not seem to be able to re-
tain an impression for a whole twelve hours. I
assured him on my own personal knowledge that
Falk possessed in himself all tlie qualities to make
his niece's future prosperous. He said he was glad
to hear this, and that he would tell his wife. Then
the object of the visit came out. He wished me to
help him to resume relations with Falk. His niece,
he said, had expressed the hope I would do so in my
kindness. He was evidently anxious that I should,
for though he seemed to have forgotten nine-tenths
of his last night's opinions and the whole of his in-
dignation, yet he evidently feared to be sent to the
right-about. " You told me he was very much in
love," he concluded slyly, and leered in a sort of bu-
colic way.

" As soon as he had left my ship I called Falk on
board by signal — the tug still lying at the anchor-
age. He took the news with calm gravity, as
though he had all along expected the stars to fight
for him in their courses.

I saw them once more together, and only once —
on the quarter-deck of the Diana. Hermann aat
smoking with a shirt-sleeved elbow hooked over the
[150]

FALK

back of his chair. Mrs. Hermann was sewing
alone. As Falk stepped over the gangway, Her-
mann's niece, with a slight swish of the skirt and a
swift friendly nod to me, glided past my chair.

They met in sunshine abreast of the mainmast.
He held her hands and looked down at them, and
she looked up at him with her candid and unseeing
glance. ' It seemed to me they had come together
as if attracted, drawn and guided to each other by
a mysterious influence. They were a complete
couple. In her grey frock, palpitating with life,
generous of form, olympian and simple, she was in-
deed the siren to fascinate that dark navigator, this
ruthless lover of the five senses. From afar I
seemed to feel the masculine strength with which
he grasped those hands she had extended to him
with a womanly swiftness. Lena, a little pale,
nursing her beloved lump of dirty rags, ran to-
wards her big friend; and then in the drowsy si-
lence of the good old ship Mrs. Hermann's voice
rang out so changed that it made me spin round in
my chair to see what was the matter.

" Lena, come here ! " she screamed. And this
good-natured matron gave me a wavering glance^

1 161 ]

FALK
dark and full of fearsome distrust. The child ran
back, surprised, to her knee. But the two, stand-
ing before each other in sunlight with clasped
hands, had heard nothing, had seen nothing and
no one. Three feet away from them in the shade
a seaman sat on a spar, very busy splicing a strop,
and dipping his fingers into a tar-pot, as if utterly
unaware of their existence.

When I returned in command of another ship,
some five years afterwards, Mr. and Mrs. Falk
had left the place. I should not wonder if Schom-
bcrg's tongue had succeeded at last in scaring Falk
away for good ; and, indubitably, there was a tale
still going about the town of a certain Falk, owner
of a tug, who had won his wife at cards from the
captain of an English ship.

[IM]

AMY FOSTER

^-

AMY FOSTER

Kennedy is a country doctor, and Uves in Cole-
brook, on the shores of Eastbay. The high
ground rising abruptly behind the red roofs of the
little town crowds the quaint High Street against
the wall which defends it from the sea. Beyond
the 8ea*wall there curves for miles in a vast and
regular sweep the barren beach of shingle, with the
village of Brenzett standing out darkly across the
water, a spire in a clump of trees ; and still further
out the perpendicular coliunn of a lighthouse, look-
ing in the distance no bigger than a lead pencil,
marks the vanishing-point of the land. The coun-
try at the back of Brenzett is low and flat, but the
bay is fairly well sheltered from the seas, and occa-
sionally a big ship, windbound or through stress
of weather, makes use of the anchoring ground a
mile and a half due north from you as you stand
at the back door of the ** Ship Inn " in Brenzett*

[166]

n

AMY FOSTER

A dilapidated windmill near by lifting its shattered
arms from a mound no loftier than a rubbish heap,
and a Martello tower squatting at the water's edge
half a mile to the south of the Coastguard cottages,
are familiar to the skippers of small craft. These
are the official seamarks for the patch of trust-
worthj bottom represented on the Admiralty cliarts
by an irregular oval of dots enclosing several fig-
ures six, with a tiny anchor engraved among them,
and the legend " mud and shells " over all.

The brow of the upland overtops the square
tower of the Colebrook Church. The slope is
greea and looped by a white road. Ascending
along this road, you open a valley broad and shal-
low, a wide green trough of pastures and hedges
merging inland into a vista of purple tints and
flowing hues closing the view.

In this valley down to Brenzett and Colebrook
and up to Darnford, the market town fourteen
miles away, lies the practice of my friend Kennedy.
He had begun life as surgeon in the Navy, and
afterwards had been the companion of a famous
traveller, in the days when there were continents
with unexplored interiors. His papers on the
[166]

AMY FOSTER

fauna and flora made him known to scientific socie-
ties. And now he had come to a country practice
— from choice. The penetrating power of his
mind, acting like a corrosive fluid, had destroyed
his ambition, I fancy. His intelligence is of a
scientific order, of an investigating habit, and of
that unappeasable curiosity which believes that
there is a particle of a general truth in every mys-
tery.

A good many years ago now, on my return from
abroad, he invited me to stay with him. I came
readily enough, and as he could not neglect his
patients to keep me company, he took me on his
rounds — ^thirty miles or so of an afternoon, some-
times. I waited for him on the roads; the horse
reached after the leafy twigs, and, sitting high in
the dogcart, I could hear Kennedy's laugh through
the half-open door left open of some cottage. He
had a big, hearty laugh that would have fitted a
man twice his size, a brisk manner, a bronzed face,
and a pair of grey, profoundly attentive eyes. He
had the talent of making people talk to him freely,
and an inexhaustible patience in listening to their
tales.

[167]

AMY FOSTER

One day, as we trotted out of a large village into
a shady bit of road, I saw on our left hand a low,
black cottage, with diamond panes in the windowsj
a creeper on the end wall, a roof of shingle, and
some roses climbing on the rickety trellis-work of
the tiny porch. Kennedy pulled up to a walk. A
woman, in full sunlight, was throwing a dripping
blanket over a line stretched between two old ap-
ple-trees. And as the bobtailcd, long-necked chest-
nut, trying to get his head, jerked the left hand,
covered by a thick dogskin glove, the doctor raised
his voice over the hedge : " How's your child,
Amy? "

I had the time to see her dull face, red, not with
a mantling blush, but as if her flat cheeks had been
vigorously slapped, and to take in the squat figure,
the scanty, dusty brown hair drawn into a tight
knot at the back of the head. She looked quite
young. With a distinct catch in her breath, her
voice sounded low and timid.

" He's wcU, thank you."

We trotted again. *' A young patient of
yours," I said; and the doctor, flicking the chest-
nut absently, muttered, " Her husband used to be."
[168]

AMY FOSTER

" She seems a dull creature," I remarked list-
lessly.

" Precisely," said Kennedy. " She is very pas-
sive. It's enough to look at the red hands hanging
at the end of those short arms, at those slow, prom-
inent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind
— an inertness that one would think made it ever-
lastingly safe from all the surprises of imagina-
tion. And yet which of us is safe? At any rate,
such as you see her, she had enough imagination
to fall in love. She's the daughter of one Isaac
Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a
shepherd ; the beginning of his misfortunes dating
from his runaway marriage with the cook of his
widowed father — a. well-to-do, apoplectic grazier,
who passionately struck his name off his will, and
had been heard to utter threats against his life.
But this old affair, scandalous enough to serve as
a motive for a Greek tragedy, arose from the simi-
larity of their characters. There are other trage-
dies, less scandalous and of a subtler poignancy,
arising from irreconcilable differences and from
that fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over
all our heads — over all our heads. . • ."

[1691

AMY FOSTER

The tired chestnut dropped into a walk ; and th«
rim of the sun, all red in a speckless sky, touched
familiarly the smooth top of a ploughed rise near
the road as I had seen it times innumerable touch
the distant horizon of the sea. \The uniform
brownness of the harrowed field glowed with a rosy
tinge, as though the powdered clods had sweated
out in minute pearls of blood the toil of uncounted
ploughmen. From the edge of a copse a waggon
with two horses was rolling gently along the ridge.
Raised above our heads upon the sky-line, it loomed
up against the red sun, triumphantly big, enor-
mous, like a chariot of giants drawn by two slow-
stepping steeds of legendary proportions. And
the clumsy figure of the man plodding at the bead
of the leading horse projected itself on the back-
ground of the Infinite with a heroic uncouthness.
The end of his carter's whip quivered high up in
the blue. Kennedy discoursed.

** She's the eldest of a large family. At the age
of fifteen they put her out to service at the New
Barns Farm. I attended Mrs. Smith, the tenant's
wife, and saw that girl there for the first time.^
Mrs. Smith, a genteel person with a sharp nose.

[160]

^

AMY FOSTER

made her put on a black dress every afternoon. I
don't know what induced me to notice her at all.
There are faces that call your attention by a cu-
rious want of definiteness in their whole aspect, as,
walking in a mist, you peer attentively at a vague
shape which, after all, may be nothing more cu-
rious or strange than a signpost. The only pecu-
liarity I perceived in her was a slight hesitation in
her utterance, a sort of preliminary stammer which
passes away with the first word. When sharply
spoken to, she was apt to lose her head at once ; but
her heart was of the kindest. She had never been
heard to express a dislike for a single human being,
and she was tender to every living creature. She
was devoted to Mrs. Smith, to Mr. Smith, to their
dogs, cats, canaries; and as to Mrs. Smith's grey
parrot, its peculiarities exercised upon her a posi-
tive fascination. Nevertheless, when that outland-
ish bird, attacked by the cat, shrieked for help in
human accents, she ran out into the yard stopping
her ears, and did not prevent the crime. For Mrs.
Smith this was another evidence of her stupidity ;
,on the other hand, her want of charm, in view of
Smith's well-known frivolousness, was a great rec-

[161]

AMY FOSTER
ommendation. Her short-sighted eyes
with pity for a poor mouse in a trap, and she had
been seen once by some boys on her knees in the wet
grass helping a toad in difficulties. If it's true, as
some German fellow has said, that without phos-
phorus there is no thought, it is still more true that
there is no kindness of heart without a certain
amount of imagination. She had some. She had
even more than is necessary to understand suffer-
ing and to be moved by pity- She fell in love un-
der circumstances that leave no room for doubt in
the matter; for you need imagination to form a
notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover
your ideal in an unfamiliar shape.

" How this aptitude came to her, what it did
feed upon, is an inscrutable mystery. She was
born in the village, and had never been further
away from it than Colebrook or perhaps Darnford.
She lived for four years with the Smiths. New
Bams Is an isolated farmhouse a mile away from
the road, and she was content to look day after
day at the same fields, hollows, rises ; at the trees
and the hedgerows; at the faces of the four men
about the farm, always the same — day after dayj
[16S]

AMY FOSTER

month after month, year after year. She never
showed a desire for conversation, and, as it seemed
to me, she did not know how to smile. Sometimes
of a fine Sunday afternoon she would put on her
best dress, a pair of stout boots, a large grey hat
trimmed with a black feather (I've seen her in that
finery), seize an absurdly slender parasol, climb
over two stiles, tramp over three fields and along
two hundred yards of road — never further. There
stood Foster's cottage. She would help her mother
to give their tea to the younger children, wash up
the crockery, kiss the little ones, and go back to
the farm. That was all. All the rest, all the
change, all the relaxation. She never seemed to
wish for anything more. And then she fell in love.
She fell in love silently, obstinately — perhaps help-
lessly. It came slowly, but when it came it worked
like a powerful spell; it was love as the Ancients
understood it : an irresistible and fateful impulse —
a possession ! Yes, it was in her to become haunted
and possessed by a face, by a presence, fatally, as
though she had been a pagan worshipper of form
under a joyous sky — ^and to be awakened at last
from that mysterious forgetfulness of self, from

[168]

AMY FOSTER
that enchantment, from that transport, by a
fear resembling the unaccountable terror of a
brute. . ■ ."

With the sun hanging low on its western limit,
the expanse of the grass-lantis framed in the coun-
ter-scarps of the rising ground took on a gorgeous
and sombre aspect, A sense of penetrating sad-
ness, like that inspired by a grave strain of music,
disengaged itaelf from the silence of the fields.
The men we met walked past slow, unsmiling, with
downcast eyes, as if the melancholy of an over-bur-
dened earth had weightod their feet, bowed their
shoulders, borne down their glances,

" Yes," said the doctor to my remark, " one
would think the earth is under a curse, since of all
her children these that cling to her the closest are
uncouth in body and as leaden of gait as if their
very hearts were loaded with chains. But here on
this same road you might have seen amongst these
heavy men a being lithe, supple, and long-limbed,
straight like a pine with something striving up-
wards in his appearance as though the heart with-
in him had been buoyant. Perhaps it was only the
force of the contrast, but when he was passing one
[16*]

J

AMY FOSTER

of these villagers here, the soles of his feet did not
seem to me to touch the dust of the road. He
vaulted over the stiles, paced these slopes with a
long elastic stride that made him noticeable at a
great distance, and had lustrous black eyes. He
was so different from the mankind aroimd that,
with his freedom of movement, his soft — ^a little
startled, glance, his olive complexion and graceful
bearing, his humanity suggested to me the nature
of a woodland creature. He came from there."

The doctor pointed with his whip, and from the
summit of the descent seen over the rolling tops of
the trees in a park by the side of the road, appeared
the level sea far below us, like the floor of an im-
mense e^fice inlaid with bands of dark ripple, with
still trails of glitter, ending in a belt of glassy
water at the foot of the sky. The light blur of
smoke, from an invisible steamer, faded on the
great clearness of the horizon like the mist of a
breath on a mirror ; and, inshore, the white sails of
a coaster, with the appearance of disentangling
themselves slowly from under the branches, floated
clear of the foliage of the trees.

" Shipwrecked In the bay? " I said.

[166]

VMY FOSTER

"Yea; he was a castaway, A poor emigrant
from Central Europe bound to America and washed
ashore here in a storm. And for him, who knew
nothing of the earth, England was an undiscovered
country. It was some time before he learned ita
name; and for all I know he might have expected
to find wild beasts or wild men here, when, crawling
in the dark over the sea-wall, he rolled down the
other aide into a dyke, where it was another miracle
he didn't get drowned. But he struggled instinc-
tively like an animal under a net, and this blind
struggle threw him out into a field. He must have
been, indeed, of a tougher fibre than he looked to
withstand without expiring sucli buffetings, the
violence of his exertions, and so much fear. Later
on, in his broken English that resembled curiously
the speech of a young child, he told me himself that
he put his trust in God, believing he was no longer
in this world. And truly — he would add — how was
he to know? He fought his way against the rain
and the gale on all fours, and crawled at last
among some sheep huddled close under the lee of a
hedge. They ran off in all directions, bleating in
the darkness, and he welcomed the first familiar
[166]

n

AMY FOSTER

sound he heard on these shores. It must have been
two in the morning then. And this is all we know
of the manner of his landing, though he did not
arrive unattended by any means. Only his grisly
company did not begin to come ashore till much
later in the day. • . .*'

The doctor gathered the reins, clicked his
tongue; we trotted down the hill. Then turning,
almost directly, a sharp comer into the High
Street, we rattled over the stones and were home.

Late in the evening Kennedy, breaking a spell
of moodiness that had come over him, returned to
the story. Smoking his pipe, he paced the long
room from end to end. A reading-lamp concen-
trated all its light upon the papers on his desk;
and, sitting by the open window, I saw, after the
windless, scorching day, the frigid splendour of a
hazy sea lying motionless under the moon. Not a
whisper, not a splash, not a stir of the shingle, not
a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth be-
low — ^never a sign of life but the scent of climbing
jasmine; and Kennedy's voice, speaking behind me,
passed through the wide casement, to vanish out-
side in a chill and sumptuous stillness.

[167]

AMY FOSTER

". . . The relations of shipwrecks in the
olden time tell ua of much suffering. Often the
castaways were only saved from drowning to die
miserably from starvation on a barren coast; oth-
ers suffered violent death or else slavery, passing
through years of precarious existence with people
to whom their strangeness was an object of suspi-
cion, dislike or fear. We read about these things,
and they are very pitiful. It is indeed hard upon
a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless,
incomprehensible, and of a mysterious origin, in
some obscure comer of the earth. Yet amongst all
the adventurers shipwrecked in all the wild parts of
the world there is not one, it seems to me, that ever
had to suffer a fate so simply tragic as the man I
am speaking of, the most innocent of adventurers
cast out by the sea in the btght of this bay, almost
within sight from this very window.

" He did not know the name of liis ship. Indeed,
In the course of time we discovered he did not even
know that ships had names — ' like Christian peo-
ple ' ; and when, one day, from the top of the Tal-
fourd Hill, he beheld the sea lying open to his view,
his eyes roamed afar, lost In an air of wild surprise,
[168]

AMY FOSTER

as though he had never seen such a sight before.
And probably he had not. As far as I could make
out, he had been hustled together with many others
on board an emigrant-ship lying at the mouth of
the Elbe, too bewildered to take note of his sur-
roundings, too weary to see anything, too anxious
to care. They were driven below into the Hween-
deck and battened down from the very start. It
was a low timber dwelling — ^he would say — ^with
wooden beams overhead, like the houses in his coun-
try, but you went into it down a ladder. It was
very large, very cold, damp and sombre, with places
in the manner of wooden boxes where people had to
sleep, one above another, and it kept on rocking all
ways at once all the time. He crept, into one of
these boxes and laid down there in the clothes in
which he had left his home many days before, keep-
ing his bundle and his stick by his side. People
groaned, children cried, water dripped, the lights
went out, the walls of the place creaked, and every-
thing was being shaken so that in one's little box
one dared not lift one's head. He had lost touch
with his only companion (a young man from the
same valley, he said), and all the time a great noise

[169]

AMY FOSTER

of wind went on outside and heavy blows fell —
' boom ! boom ! An awful sickness overcame him,
even to the point of making him neglect his pray-
ers. Besides, one could not tell whether it wai
morning or evening. It seemed always to be night
in that place.

" Before that he had been travelling a long, long
time on the iron track. He looked out of the win'
dow, which had a wonderfully clear glass in it, and
the trees, the houses, the fields, and the long roads
seemed to fly round and round about him till his
head swam. He gave me to understand that he had
on his passage beheld uncounted multitudes of peo-
ple — whole nations — all dressed in such clothes as
the rich wear. Once he was made to get out of the
carriage, and slept through a night on a bench in
a house of bricks with his bundle under his head;
and once for many hours he had to sit on a floor of
flat stones dozing, with his knees up and with his
bundle between his feet. There was a roof over him,
which seemed made of glass, and was so high that
the tallest mountain-pine he had ever seen would
have had room to grow under it. Steam -machines
rolled in at one end and out at the other. People
[170]

AMY FOSTER

swarmed more than you can see on a feast-day «
round the miraculous Holy Image in the yard of
the Carmelite Convent down in the plains where,
before he left his home, he drove his mother in a
wooden cart — a. pious old woman who wanted to
offer prayers and make a vow for his safety. He
could not give me an idea of how large and lofty
and full of noise and smoke and gloom, and clang
of iron, the place was, but some one had told him
it was called Berlin. Then they rang a bell, and
another steam-machine came in, and again he was
taken on and on through a land that wearied his
eyes by its flatness without a single bit of a hill to
be seen anywhere. One more night he spent shut
up in a building like a good stable with a litter of
straw on the floor, guarding his bundle amongst a
lot of men, of whom not one could understand a
single word he said. In the morning they were all
led down to the stony shores of an extremely broad
muddy river, flowing not between hills but between
houses that seemed immense. There was a steam-
machine that went on the water, and they all stood
upon it packed tight, only now there were with
them many women and children who made much

[171]

AMY FOSTER
noise. A cold rain fell, the wind blew in his face ;
he was wet through, and his teeth chattered. He
and the young man from the same valley took each
other by the hand.

" They thought they were being taken to Amer-
ica straight away, but suddenly the steam-machine
bumped against the side of a thing like a house on
the water. The walls were smooth and black, and
there uprose, growing from the roof as it were,
bare trees in the shape of crosses, extremely high.
That's how it appeared to him then, for he had
never seen a ship before. This was the ship that
was going to swim all the way to America. Voices
shouted, everything swayed; there was a ladder
dipping up a>d down. He went up on his hands
and knees in mortal fear of falling into the water
below, which made a great splashing. He got sep-
arated from his companion, and when he descended
into the bottom of that ship his heart seemet' to melt
Buddtnly within him.

" It was then also, as he told me, that he lost con-
tact for good and all with one of those three men
who the summer before had been going about
through all the little towns in the foothills of his

1

AMY FOSTER

country. They would arrive on market days driv-
ing in a peasant's cart, and would set up an office
in an inn or some other Jew's house. There were
three of them, of whom one with a long beard
looked venerable; and they had red cloth collars
round their necks and gold lace on their sleeves
like Government officials. They sat proudly behind
a long table ; and in the next room, so that the com-
mon people shouldn't hear, they kept a cunning
telegraph machine, through which they could talk
to the Emperor of America. The fathers hung
about the door, but the young men of the mountains
would crowd up to the table asking many questions,
for there was work to be got all the year round at
three dollars a day in America, aid no military
service to do.

"But the American Kaiser would not take every-
body. Oh, no ! He himself had a great difficulty
in getting accepted, and the venerable man in uni-
form had to go out of the room several times to
work the telegraph on his behalf. The American
Kaiser engaged him at last at three dollars, he
being young and strong. However, many able
young men backed out, afraid of the great dis-

[173]

AMY FOSTER

tance; besides, those only who had some money
could be taken. There were some who sold their
hutfi and their land because it cost a lot of money
to get to America; but then, once there, you had
three dollars a day, and if you were clever you
could find places where true gold could be picked
up on the ground. His father's house was getting
over full. Two of his brothers were married and
had children. He promised to send money home
from America by post twice a year. His father
sold an old cow, a pair of piebald mountain ponies
of his own raising, and a cleared plot of fair pas-
ture land on the sunny slope of a pine-clad pass to
a Jew inn-keeper in order to pay the people of the
ship that too^ men to America to get rich in a
short time.

" He must have been a real adventurer at heart,
for how many of the greatest enterprises in the
conquest of the earth had for their beginning just
such a bargaining away of the paternal cow for the
mirage or true gold far away ! I have been telling
you more or less in my own words what I learned
fragmcntarily in tlie course of two or three year^,
during which I seldom missed an opportunity of a
[174]

AMY FOSTER

friendly chat with him. He told me this story of
his adventure with many flashes of white teeth and
lively glances of black eyes, at first in a sort of anx-
ious baby-talk, then, as he acquired the language,
with great fluency, but always with that singing,
soft, and at the same time vibrating intonation that
instilled a strangely penetrating power into the
sound of the most familiar English words, as if
they had been the words of an unearthly language.
And he always would come to an end, wit]i many
emphatic shakes of his head^ upon that awful sen-
sation of his heart melting within him directly he
set foot on board that ship. Afterwards there
semed to come for him a period of blank ignorance,
at any rate as to facts. No doubt he must have
been abominably sea-sick and abominably unhappy
— this soft and passionate adventurer, taken thus
out of his knowledge, and feeling bitterly as he lay
in his emigrant bunk his utter loneliness; for his
was a highly sensitive nature. The next thing we
know of him for certain is that he had been hiding
in Hammond's pig-pound by the side of the road
to Norton six miles, as the crow flies, from the sea.
Of these experiences he was unwilling to speak:

[175]

AMY FOSTER
Ihey seemed to have seared into his soul a sombre
sort of wonder and indignation. Through the ru-
mours of the country-side, which lasted for a good
many days after his arrival, we know that the fish-
ermen of West Colebrook had been disturbed and
startled by heavy knocks against the walls of
weatherboard cottages, and by a voice crying
piercingly strange words in the night. Sr-eral of
them turned out even, but, no doubt, he had fled in
sudden alarm at their rough angry tones hailing
each other in the darkness. A sort of frenzy must
have helped him up the steep Norton hill. It was
he, no doubt, who early the following morning had
been seen lying (in a awoon, I should say) on the
roadside grass by the Brenzett carrier, who actually
got down to have a nearer look, but drew back, in-
timidated by the perfect immobility, and by some-
thing queer in the aspect of that tramp, sleeping
so still under the showers. As the day advanced,
some children came dashing into school at Norton
in such a fright that the schoolmistress went out
and spoke indignantly to a * horrid-looking man '
on the road. He edged away, hanging his head,
for a few steps, and then suddenly ran off with ex-
[176]

AMY FOSTER

traordinary fleetness. The driver of Mr. Brad-
ley's milk-cart made no secret of it that he had
lashed with his whip at a hairy sort of gipsy fd-
low who, jumping up at a turn of the road by the
Vents, made a snatch at the pony's bridle. And
he caught him a good one too, right over the face,
he said, that made him drop down in the mud a
jolly sight quicker than he had jumped up ; but it
was a good half-a-mile before he could stop the
pony. Maybe that in his desperate endeavours to
get help, and in his need to get in touch with some
one, the poor devil had tried to stop the cart. Also
three boys confessed afterwards to throwing stones
at a funny tramp, knocking about all wet and
muddy, and, it seemed, very drunk, in the narrow
deep lane by the limekilns. All this was tiie talk of
three villages for days; but we have Mrs. Finn's
(the wife of Smith's waggoner) unimpeachable
testimony that she saw him get over the low wall of
Hammond's pig-pound and lurch straight at her,
babbling .aloud in a voice that was enough to make
one die of fright. Having the baby with her in a
perambulator, Mrs. Finn called out to him to go
away, and as he persisted in coming nearer, she hit

[177]

AMY POSTER

him courageously with her umbrella over the head,
and, without once looking back, ran like the wind
with the perambulator as far as the first house in
the village. She stopped then, out of breath, and
spoke to old Lewis, hammering there at a heap of
stones ; and the old chap, taking off his immense
black wire goggles, got up on his shaky legs to
look where she pointed. Together they followed
with their eyes the figure of the man running over
a field; they saw him fall down, pick himself up,
and run on again, staggering and waving his long
arms above his head, in the direction of the New
Barns Farm. From that moment be is plainly in
the toils of his obscure and touching destiny.
There is no doubt after this of what happened to
him. All is certain now: Mrs. Smith's intense ter-
ror; Amy Foster's stolid conviction held against
the other's nervous attack, that the man ' meant no
harm'; Smith's exasperation (on his return from
Darnford Market) at finding the dog barking
himself into a fit, tlie hack -door locked, his wife in
hysterics ; and all for an unfortunate dirty tramp,
supposed to be even then lurking in his stackyard.
Was he ? He would teach him to frighten women.
[178]

J

AMY FOSTER

" Smith IS notoriously hot-tempered, but the
sight of some nondescript and miry creature sitting
crosslegged amongst a lot of loose straw, and
swinging itself to and fro like a bear in a cage,
made him pause. Then this tramp stood up si-
lently before him, one mass of mud and filth from
head to foot. Smith, alone amongst his stacks with
this apparition, in the stormy twilight ringing with
the infuriated barking of the dog, felt the dread
of an inexplicable strangeness. But when that be-
ing, parting with his black hands the long matted
locks that hung before his face, as you part the two
halves of a curtain, looked out at him with glisten-
ing, wild, black-and-white eyes, the weirdness of
this silent encounter fairly staggered him. He had
admitted since (for the story has been a legitimate
subject of conversation about here for years) that
he made more than one step backwards. Then a
sudden burst of rapid, senseless speech persuaded
him at once that he had to do with an escaped luna-
tic. In fact, that impression never wore off com-
pletely. Smith has not in his heart given up his
secret conviction of the man's essential insanity to
this very day.

AMY FOSTER

" As the creature approaclied him, jabbering in
a most discomposing manner. Smith (unaware that
he was being addressed as ' gracious lord,' and ad-
jured in God's name to afford food and shelter)
kept on speaking firmly but gently to it, and re-
treating all the time into the other yard. At last,
watching his chance, by a sudden charge he bun-
dled him headlong into the wood-lodge, and in-
stantly shot the bolt. Thereupon he wiped his
brow, though the day was cold. He had done his
duty to the community by shutting up a wander-
ing and probably dangerous maniac. Smith isn't
a hard man at all, but he had room in his brain only
for that one idea of lunacy. He was not imagina-
tive enough to ask himself whether the man might
not be perishing with cold and hunger. Meantime,
at first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in
the lodge. Mrs. Smith was screaming upstairs,
where she had locked herself in her bedroom ; but
Amy Foster sobbed piteously at the kitchen door,
wringing her hands and muttering, ' Don't !
don't ! ' I daresay Smith had a rough time of it
that evening with one noise and another, and this
insane, disturbing voice crying obstinately through
[180]

AMY FOSTER

the door only added to his irritation. He couldn't
possibly have connected this troublesome lunatic
with the sinking of a ship in Eastbay, of which
there had been a rumour in the Darnford market-
place. And I daresay the man inside had been very
near to insanity on that night. Before his excite-
ment collapsed and he became unconscious he was
throwing himself violently about in the dark, roll-
ing on some dirty sacks, and biting his fists with
rage, cold, hunger, amazement, and despair.

" He was a mountaineer of the eastern range of
the Carpathians, and the vessel sunk the night be-
fore in Eastbay was the Hamburg emigrant-ship
Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea, of appalling mem-
ory.

** A few months later we could read in the papers
the accounts of the bogus * Emigration Agencies '
among the Sclavonian peasantry in the more re-
mote provinces of Austria. The object of these
scoundrels was^ to get hold of the poor ignorant
people's homesteads, and they were in league with
the local usurers. They exported their victims
through Hamburg mostly. As to the ship, I had
watched her out of this very window, reaching

[ 181 ]

AMY FOSTER
close-hauled under sliort canvas into tlie bay on a.
dark, threatening afternoon. She came to an an-
chor, correctly by the chart, off tlie Brcnzctt Coast-
guard station. I remember before the night fell
looking out again at the outlines of her spars and
rigging that stood out dark and pointed on a back-
ground of ragged, slaty clouds like another and a
slighter spire to the left of the Brcnzctt cliurch-
tower. In the evening the wind rose. At midnight
I could hear in my bed the terrific gusts and the
sounds of a driving deluge.

" About that time the Coastguardmcn thought
tbcy saw the lights of a steamer over the anchoring-
ground. In a moment they vanished ; but it is clear
that another vessel of some sort had tried for shel-
ter in the bay on that awful, blind night, had
rammed the German ship amidships (a breach —
as one of the divers told me afterwards — * that you
could sail a Thames barge through'), and then
had gone out either scathless or damaged, who shall
say ; but had gone out, unknown, unseen, and fatal,
to perish mysteriously at sea. Of her notliing ever
came to light, and yet the hue and cry that was
raised all over the world would have found her out
[182]

AMY FOSTER

if she had been in existence anywhere on the face
of the waters.

" A completeness without a clue, and a stealthy
silence as of a neatly executed crime, characterise
this murderous disaster, which, as you may remem-
ber, had its gruesome celebrity. The wind would
have prevented the loudest outcries from reaching
the shore ; there had been evidently no time for sig-
nals of distress. It was death without any sort of
fuss. The Hamburg ship, filling all at once, cap-
sized as she sank, and at daylight there was not
even the end of a spar to be seen above water. She
was missed, of course, and at first the Coastguard-
men surmised that she had either dragged her an-
chor or parted her cable some time during the
night, and had been blown out to sea. Then, after
the tide turned, the wreck must have shifted a little
and released some of the bodies, because a child
— ^a little fair-haired child in a red frock —
came ashore abreast of the Martello tower. By
the afternoon you could see along three miles of
beach dark figures with bare legs dashing in
and out of the tumbling foam, and rough-look-
ing men, women with hard faces, children, mostly

[183]

AMY FOSTER
fair-haired, were being carried, stiff and d.ipping,
on stretchers, on wattles, on ladders, in a long
procession past the door of the ' Ship Inn,' to be
laid out in a row under the north wall of the
Brenzctt Church,

" Officially, the body of the Httle girl in the red
frock is the first thing that came ashore from that
ship. But I have patients amongst the seafaring
population of West Colebrook, and, unofficially, I
am informed that very early tliat morning two
brothers, who went down to look after their cobble
hauled up on the beach, found, a good way from
Brenzctt, an ordinary ship's hencoop lying high
and dry on the shore, with eleven drowned ducks
inside. Their families ate the birds, and tlie hen-
coop was split into firewood with a hatchet. It is
possible that a man (supposing he happened to be
on deck at the time of the accident) might have
floated ashore on that hencoop. He might. I ad-
mit it is improbable, but there was the man — and
for days, nay, for weeks — it didn't enter our heads
that we had amongst us the only living soul that
had escaped from that disaster. The man himself,
even when he learned to speak intelligibly, could
[181]

AMY FOSTER

tell us very little. He remembered he had felt bet-
ter (after the ship had anchored, I suppose), and
that the darkness, the wind, and the rain took his
breath away. This looks as if he had been on deck
some time during that night. But we mustn't forget
he had been taken out of his knowledge, that he
had been sea-sick and battened down below for four
days, that he had no general notion of a ship or of
the sea, and therefore could have no definite idea
of what was happening to him. The rain, the
wind, the darkness he knew; he understood the
bleating of the sheep, and he remembered the pain
of his wretchedness and misery, his heartbroken as-
tonishment that it was neither seen nor understood,
his dismay at finding all the men angry and all the
women fierce. He had approached them as a beg-
gar, it is true, he said ; but in his country, even if
they gave nothing, they spoke gently to beggars.
The children in his country were not taught to
throw stones at those who asked for compassion.
Smith's strategy overcame him completely. The
wood-lodge presented the horrible aspect of a dun-
geon. What would be done to him next? . . .
No wonder that Amy Foster appeared to his eyes

[186]

AMY FOSTER
with the aureole of an angel of light. The girl
had not been able to sleep for thinking of the poor
man, and in the morning, before the Smiths were
up, she slipped out across the back yard. Holding
the door of the wood-lodge ajar, slie looked in and
extended to him half a loaf of white bread — ' sucli
bread as the rich eat in my country,' he used to
say,

" At this he got up slowly from amongst all sorts
of rubbish, stiff, hungry, trembling, miserable, and
doubtful. 'Can you eat this?' she asked in her
soft and timid voice. He must have taken her for
a ' gracious lady.' He devoured ferociously, and
tears were falling on the crust. Suddenly he
dropped the bread, seized her wrist, and im-
printed a kiss on her hand. She was not fright-
ened. Through his forlorn condition she had
observed that he was good-looking. She shut
the door and walked back slowly to the kitchen.
Much later on, she told Mrs, Smith, who shud-
dered at the bare idea of being touched by that
creature.

" Through this act of impulsive pity he was
brought back again within the pale of hiunan rela-
[186]

J

AMY FOSTER

tions with his new surroundings. He never forgot
it — never.

" That very same morning old Mr. Swaffer
(Smith's nearest neighbour) came over to give his
advice, and ended by carrying him off. He stood,
unsteady on his legs, meek, and caked over in half-
dried mud, while the two men talked around him in
an incomprehensible tongue. Mrs. Smith had re-
fused to come downstairs till the madman was off
the premises ; Amy Foster, far from within the dark
kitchen, watched through the open back door; and
he obeyed the signs that were made to him to the
best of his ability. But Smith was full of mistrust.
* Mind, sir ! It may be all his cunning,' he cried
repeatedly in a tone of warning. When Mr.
Swaffer started the mare, the deplorable being sit-
ting humbly by his side, through weakness, nearly
fell out over the back of the high two-wheeled cart.
Swaffer took him straight home. And it is then
that I come upon the scene.

" I was called in by the simple process of the old
man beckoning to me with his forefinger over the
gate of his house as I happened to be driving past.
I got down, of course.

[187]

AMY FOSTER

" ' I've got something here,' he mumbled, lead-
ing the way to an outhouse at a little distance from
his other farm-buildings.

" It was there that I saw him first, in a long low
room taken upon the space of that sort of coach-
house. It was bare and whitewashed, with a small
square aperture glazed with one cracked, dusty
pane at its further end. He was lying on his back
upon a straw paUet; they had given him a couple
of horse-blankets, and lie seemed to have spent tlie
remainder of his strength in the exertion of clean-
ing himself. He was almost speechless; his quick
breathing under the blankets pulled up to his chin,
his ghttcring, restless black eyes reminded me of a
wild bird caught in a snare. While I was examining
him, old Swaffer stood silently by the door, passing
the tips of his fingers along his shaven upper lip.
I gave some directions, promised to send a bottle of
medicine, and naturally made some inquiries.

*' ' Smith caught him in the stackyard at New
Barns,' said the old chap in his deliberate, unmoved
manner, and as if the other had been indeed a sort
of wild animal. ' That's how I came by him.
Quite a curiosity, isn't he? Now tell me, doctor — •

[188]

J

AMY FOSTER

you've been all over the world — don't you think
that's a bit of a Hindoo we've got hold of here.'

" I was greatly surprised. His long black hair
scattered over the straw bolster contrasted with the
olive pallor of his face. It occurred to me he might
be a Basque. It didn't necessarily follow that he
should understand Spanish; but I tried him with
the few words I know, and also with some French.
The whispered sounds I caught by bending my ear
to his lips puzzled me utterly. That afternoon the
young ladies from the Rectory (one of them read
Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had strug-
gled with Dante for years), coming to see Miss
SwafFer, tried their German and Italian on him
from the doorway. They retreated, just the least
bit scared by the flood of passionate speech which,
turning on his pallet, he let out at them. They ad-
mitted that the sound was pleasant, soft, musical —
but, in conjunction with his looks perhaps, it was
startling — so excitable, so utterly unlike anything
one had ever heard. The village boys climbed up
the bank to have a peep through the little square
aperture. Everybody was wondering what Mr.
Swaffer would do with him.

[189]

AMY FOSTER ',

" He simply kept him.

" Swaffer would be called eccentric were he not
so much respected. They will tell you that Mr.
SwafFer sits up as late as ten o'clock at night to
read books, and they will tell you also that he can
write a cheque for two hundred pounds without
thinking twice about it. He himself would tell
you that the Swaffers had owned land between
this and Damford for these three hundred years.
He must be eighty-five to-day, but he does not look
a bit older than when I first came here. He is a
great breeder of sheep, and deals extensively in cat-
tle. He attends market days for miles around in
every sort of weather, and drives sitting bowed low
over the reins, his lank grey hair curling over the
collar of his warm coat, and with a green plaid rug
round his legs. The calmness of advanced age
gives a solemnity to his manner. He is clean-
shaved; his lips are thin and sensitive: something
rigid and monachal in the set of his features lends
a certain elevation to the character of his face. He
has been known to drive miles in the rain to see a
new kind of rose in somebody's garden, or a mon-
Btrous cabbage grown by a cottager, He loves to
[190]

AMY FOSTER

hear tell of or to be shown something that he calls
* outlandish.' Perhaps it was just that outlandish-
ness of the man which influenced old Swaffer. Per-
haps it was only an inexplicable caprice. All I
know is that at the end of three weeks I caught
sight of Smith's lunatic digging in Swaffer's kitch-
en garden. They had found out he could use a
spade. He dug barefooted.

" His black hair flowed over his shoulders. I
suppose it was Swaffer who had given him the
striped old cotton shirt; but he wore still the na-
tional brown cloth trousers (in which he had been
washed ashore) fitting to the leg almost like
tights ; was belted with a broad leathern belt stud-
ded with little brass discs ; and had never yet ven-
tured into the village. The land he looked upon
seemed to him kept neatly, like the grounds round
a landowner's house; the size of the cart-horses
struck him with astonishment ; the roads resembled
garden walks, and the aspect of the people, espe-
cially on Sundays, spoke of opulence. He won-
dered what made them so hardhearted and their
children so bold. He got his food at the back door,
carried it in both hands carefully to his outhouse,

[ 191 ]

AMY FOSTER
and, sitting alone on his pallet, would make the sign
of the cross before he began. Beside the same pal-
let, kneeling in the early darkness of the short dajs,
he recited aloud the Lord's Prayer before he slept.
Whenever he saw old SwafFer he would bow with
veneration from the waist, and stand erect while
the old man, with his fingers over his upper Up, sur-
veyed him silently. He bowed also to Hiss SwafFer,
who kept house frugally for her father — a broad-
shouldered, big-boned woman of forty-five, with
the pocket of her dress full of keys, and a grey,
steady eye. She was Church— as people said
(while her fatlier was one of the trustees of the
Baptist Chapel) — and wore a little steel cross at
her waist. She dressed severely in black, in mem-
ory of one of the innumerable Bradleys of the
neighbourhood, to whom she had been engaged
some twenty-five years ago — a young farmer who
broke his neck out liuntjng on the eve of the wed-
ding day. She had the unmoved countenance of
the deaf, spoke very seldom, and her lips, thin like
her father's, astonished one sometimes by a myste-
riously ironic curl,

" These were the people to whom he owed alle-
[ 192]

AMY FOSTER

glance, and an overwhelming loneliness seemed to
fall from the leaden sky of that winter without sun-
shine. All the faces were sad. He could talk to
no one, and had no hope of ever understanding
anybody. It was as if these had been the faces of
people from the other world — dead people — ^he
used to tell me years afterwards. Upon my word,
I wonder he did not go mad. He didn't know
where he was. Somewhere very far from his moun-
tains — somewhere over the water. Was this Amer-
ica, he wondered?

" If it hadn't been for the steel cross at Miss
Swaffer's belt he would not, he confessed, have
known whether he was in a Christian country at
all. He used to cast stealthy glances at it, and feel
comforted. There was nothing here the same as in
his country ! The earth and the water were differ-
ent ; there were no images of the Redeemer by the
roadside. The very grass was different, and the
trees. All the trees but the three old Norway pines
on the bit of lawn before Swaffer's house, and
these reminded him of his country. He had been
detected once, after dusk, with his forehead against
the trunk of one of them, sobbing, and talking to

[ 193 ]

AMY FOSTER

himself. Thej had been like brothers to him at that
time, he afBmied. Everything else was strange.
Conceive you the kind of an existence overshad-
owed, oppressed, by the everyday material appear-
ances, as if by the visions of a nightmare. At
night, when he could not sleep, he kept on thinking
of the girl who gave him the first piece of bread he
had eaten in this foreign land. She had been
neither fierce nor angry, nor frightened. Her face
he remembered as the only comprehensible face
amongst all these faces that were as closed, as mys-
terious, and as mute as the faces of the dead who
are possessed of a knowledge beyond the compre-
hension of the living, I wonder whether the mem-
ory of her compassion prevented him from cutting
his throat. But there! I suppose I am an old sen-
timentalist, and forget the instinctive love of life
which it takes all the strength of an uncommon de-
spair to overcome.

" He did the work which was given him with an
intelligence which surprised old Swaffer. By-and-
by it was discovered that he could help at the
ploughing, could milk the cows, feed the bullocks
in the cattle-yard, and was of some use with the

[191]

J

AMY FOSTER

sheep. He began to pick up words, too, very fast ;
and suddenly, one fine morning in spring, he res-
cued from an untimely death a grand-child of old
Swaffer.

" Swaffer's younger daughter is married to
Willcox, a solicitor and the Town Clerk of Cole-
brook. Regularly twice a year they come to stay
with the old man for a few days. Their only child,
a little girl not three years old at the time, ran out
of the house alone in her little white pinafore, and,
toddling across the grass of a terraced garden,
pitched herself over a low wall head first into the
horsepond in the yard below.

" Our man was out with the waggoner and the
plough in the field nearest to the house, and as he
was leading the team round to begin a fresh fur-
row, he saw, through the gap of the gate, what for
anybody else would have been a mere flutter of
something white. But he had straight-glancing,
quick, far-reaching eyes, that only seemed to flinch
and lose their amazing power before the immensity
of the sea. He was barefooted, and looking as out-
landish as the heart of Swaffer could desire. Leav-

»

ing the horses on the turn, to the inexpressible dis-

[196]

AMY FOSTER
gust of the waggoner he bounded off, going over
the ploughed ground in long leaps, and suddenly
appeared before the mother, thrust the child into
her anns, and strode away.

" The pond was not very deep ; but still, if he
had not had such good eyes, the child would have
perished — miserably suffocated in the foot or so of
sticky mud at the bottom. Old Swaffer walked out
slowly into the field, waited till the plough came
over to his side, had a good look at him, and with-
out saying a word went back to the house. But
from that time they laid out his meals on the kitch-
en table ; and at first, Miss Swaffer, aU in black and
with an inscrutable face, would come and stand in
the doorway of the living-room to see him make a
big sign of the cross before he fell to. I believe that
from that day, too, SwafFer began to pay him reg-
ular wages.

" I can't follow step by step his development^
He cut his hair short, was seen in the village and
along the road going to and fro to his work hke
any other man. Children ceased to shout after him
He became aware of social differences, but re-
mained for a long time surprised at the bare pov-

[196]

J

AMY FOSTER

erty of the churches among so much wealth. He
couldn't understand either why they were kept shut
up on week days. There was nothing to steal in
them. Was it to keep people from praying too
often? The rectory took much notice of him about
that time, and I believe the young ladies attempted
to prepare the ground for his conversion. They
could not, however, break him of his habit of cross-
ing himself, but he went so far as to take off the
string with a couple of brass medals the size of a
sixpence, a tiny metal cross, and a square sort of
scapulary which he wore round his neck. He hung
them on the wall by the side of his bed, and he was
still to be heard every evening reciting the Lord's
Prayer, in incomprehensible words and in a slow,
fervent tone, as he had heard his old father do at
the head of all the kneeling family, big and little,
on every evening of his Ufe. And though he wore
corduroys at work, and a slop-made pepper-and-
salt suit on Sundays, strangers would turn round
to look after him on the road. His f oreignness had
a peculiar and indelible stamp. At last people be-
came used to see him. But they never became used
to him. His rapid, skimming walk; his swarthy

[197]

AMY FOSTER
complexion ; his hat cocked on the left ear ; his hab-
it, on warm evenings, of wearing his coat over one
shoulder, like a hussar's dolman ; his manner of
leaping over the stiles, not as a feat of agilitj, but
in the ordinary course of progressi onfall these
peculiarities were, as one may say, so many causes
of scorn and offence to the inhabitants of the vil-
lage. They wouldn't in their dinner hour lie flat
on their backs on the grass to stare at the sky.
Neither did they go about the fields screaming dis-
mal tunes. Many times have I heard his high-
pitched voice from behind the ridge of some slop-
ing sheep-walk, a voice light and soaring, like a
lark's, but with a melancholy human note, over our
fields that hear only the song of birds. And I
should be startled myself. Ah! He was different:
innocent of heart, and full of good will, which no-
body wanted, this castaway, that, like a man trans-
planted into another planet, was separated by an
immense space from his past and by an immense
ignorance from his future. His quick, fervent ut-
terance positively shocked everybody, ' An excit-
able devil,' they called him. One evening, in the
tap-room of the Coach and Horses (having drunk
[198]

AMY FOSTER

some whisky), he upset them all by singing a love
song of his country. They hooted him down, and
he was pained; but Preble, the lame wheelwright,
and Vincent, the fat blacksmith, and the other nota-
bles too, wanted to drink their evening beer in
peace. On another occasion he tried to show them
how to dance. The dust rose in clouds from the
sanded floor; he leaped straight up amongst the
deal tables, struck his heels together, squatted on
one heel in front of old Preble, shooting out the
other leg, uttered wild and exulting cries, jumped up
to whiri on one foot, snapping his fingers above his
head — ^and a strange carter who was having a drink
in there began to swear, and cleared out with his
half-pint in his hand into the bar. But when sud-
denly he sprang upon a table and continued to
dance among the glasses, the landlord interfered.
He didn't want any * accrobat tricks in the tap-
room.' They laid their hands on him. Having
had a glass or two, Mr. Swaffer's foreigner tried
to expostulate: was ejected forcibly: got a black
eye.

" I believe he felt the hostility of his human sur-
roundings. But he was tough — ^tough in spirit,

[199]

too,

AMY FOSTER
i well as in body. Only the memory of the

Bea frightened him, with that vague terror that b
left by a bad dream. His home was far away; and
he did not want now to go to America. I had often
explained to him that there is no place on earth
where true gold can be found lying ready and to be
got for the trouble of the picking up. How then,
he asked, could he ever return home with empty
hands when there had been sold a cow, two ponies,
and a bit of land to pay for his going P His eyes
would fill with tears, and, averting them from the
immense shimmer of the sea, he would throw him-
self face down on the grass. But sometimes, cock-
ing his hat with a little conquering air, he would
defy my wisdom. He had found his bit of true
gold. That was Amy Foster's heart ; which was ' a
golden heart, and soft to people's misery,' he
would say in the accents of overwhelming convic-
tion.

" He was called Yanko. He had explained that
this meant little John ; but as he would also repeat
very often that he was a mountaineer (some word
sounding in the dialect of his country like Goorall)
he got it for his surname. And this is the only

[SOO]

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AMY FOSTER

trace of him that the succeeding ages may find in
the marriage register of the parish. There it
stands — Yanko Goorall — in the rector's handwrit-
ing. The crooked cross made by the castaway, a
cross whose tracing no doubt seemed to him the
most solemn part of the whole ceremony, is all that
remains now to perpetuate the memory of his name.

" His courtship had lasted some time — ever since
he got his precarious footing in the community. It
began by his buying for Amy Foster a green satin
ribbon in Darnf ord. This was what you did in his
country. You bought a ribbon at a Jew's stall on
a fair-day. I don't suppose the girl knew what to
do with it, but he seemed to think that his honoura-
ble intentions could not be mistaken.

" It was only when he declared his purpose to
get married that I fully understood how, for a hun-
dred futile and inappreciable reasons, how — shall
I say odious? — ^he was to all the countryside^
Every old woman in the village was up in arms.
Smith, coming upon him near the farm, promised
to break his head for him if he found him about
again. But he twisted his little black moustache
with such a bellicose air and rolled such big, black

£801]

AMY POSTER
fierce eyes at Smith that this promise came to noth-
ing. Smith, however, told the girl that she must
be mad to take up with a man who was surely wrong
in his head. All the same, when she heard him in
the gloaming whistle from beyond the orchard a
couple of bars of a weird and mournful tune, she
would drop whatever she had in her hand — she
would leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence
— and she would run out to his calt- Mrs, Smith
called her a shameless hussy. She answered noth-
ing. She said nothing at all to anybody, and went
on her way as if she had been deaf. She and I alone
all in the land, I fancy, could see his very real
beauty. He was very good-looking, and most
graceful in his bearing, with that something wild
as of a woodland creature in his aspect. Her motli-
er moaned over her dismally whenever the girl came
to see her on her day out. The father was surly,
but pretended not to know; and Mrs, Finn once
told her plainly that ' this man, ray dear, will do
you some harm some day yet.' And so it went on.
They could be seen on the roads, she tramping stol-
idly in her finery — grey dress, black feather, stout
boots, prominent white cotton gloves that caught

[302]

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AMY FOSTER

your eye a hundred yards away; and he, his coat
slung picturesquely over one shoulder, pacing by
her side, gallant of bearing and casting tender
glances upon the girl with the golden heart. I
wonder whether he saw how plain she was. Perhaps
among types so different from what he had ever
seen, he had not the power to judge; or perhaps
he was seduced by the divine quality of her
pity.

" Yanko was in great trouble meantime. In his
country you get an old man for an ambassador in
marriage affairs. He did not know how to pro-
ceed. However, one day in the midst of sheep in a
field (he was now Swaffer's under-shepherd with
Foster) he took off his hat to the father and de-
clared himself humbly. * I daresay she's fool
enough to marry you,' was all Foster said. * And
then,' he used to relate, * he puts his hat on his head,
looks black at me as if he wanted to cut my throat,
whistles the dog, and off he goes, leaving me to do
the work.' The Fosters, of course, didn't like to
lose the wages the girl earned : Amy used to give all
her money to her mother. But there was in Foster
a very genuine aversion to that match. He con-

[803]

AMY FOSTER
tended that the fellow was very good with sheep,
but was not fit for any girl to marry. For one
thing, he used to go along the hedges muttering to
himself like a dam' fool ; and then, these foreign-
ers behave very queerly to women sometimes. And
perhaps he would want to carry her off somewhere
— or run off himself. It was not safe. He
preached it to his daughter that the fellow might
ill-use her in some way. She made no answer. It
was, they said in the village, as if the man had done
something to her. People discussed the matter. It
was quite an excitement, and the two went on
' walking out ' together in the face of opposition.
Then something unexpected happened.

" I don't know whether old Swaffer ever under-
stood how much he was regarded in the light of a
father by his foreign retainer. Anyway the rela-
tion was curiously feudal. So when Yanko asked
formally for an interview — ' and the Miss too ' (he
called the severe, deaf Miss Swaffer >imply Miss)
• — it was to obtain their permission to marry.
Swaffer heard him unmoved, dismissed him by a
nod, and then shouted the intelligence into Miss
Swaffer's best ear. She showed no surprise, and

[204]

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AMY FOSTER

only remarked grimly, in a veiled blank voice, * He
certainly won't get any other girl to marry him.'

" It is Miss Swaffer who has all the credit of the
munificence: but in a very few days it came out
that Mr. Swaffer had presented Yanko with a cot-
tage (the cottage you've seen this morning) and
something like an acre of ground — ^had made it
over to him in absolute property. Willcox expe-
dited the deed, and I remember him telling me he
had a great pleasure in making it ready. It re-
cited : * In consideration of saving the life of my
beloved grandchild, Bertha Willcox.'

" Of course, after that no power on earth could
prevent them from getting married.

" Her infatuation endured. People saw her go-
ing out to meet him in the evening, she standing
with unblinking, fascinated eyes up the road where
he was expected to appear, walking freely, with a
swing from the hip, and humming one of the love-
tunes of his country. When the boy was bom, he
got elevated at the * Coach and Horses,' essayed
again a song and a dance, and was again ejected.
People expressed their commiseration for a woman
married to that Jack-in-the-box. He didn't care.

[205]

AMY FOSTER
Tliere was a man now (Jjp told me boastfully) to
whom he could sing and talk in the language of his
country, and show how to dance by-and-bj'.

" But I don't know. To me he appeared to have
grown less springy of step, heavier in body, less
keen of eye. Imagination, no doubt; but it seems
to me now as if the. net of fate had been drawn
closer round him already'

" One day I met him on tbe footpath over the
Talfourd Hill. He told me that ' women were fun-
ny.' I had heard already of domestic differences.
People were saying that Amy Foster was begin-
ning to find out what sort af man she had married.
He looked upon the sea with indifferent, unseeing
eyes. His wife had snatched the child out of his
arms one day as he sat on the doorstep crooning to
it a song such as the ihothers sing to babies in his
mountains. She seemed to think he was doing it
some harm. Women are funny. And she had ob-
jected to him praying aloud in tbe evening. Why?
He expected the boy to repeat the prayer aloud
after him by-and-by, as he used to do after his old
father when he was a child — in his own country.
And I discovered he longed for theit boy to grow
[ 306 ]

AMY FOSTER

up so that he could have a man to talk with in that
language that to #ir ears sounded so disturbing,
so passionate, and so bizarre. Why his wife
should dislike the idea he couldn't tell. But that
would pass, he said. And tilting his head know-
ingly, he tapped his breastbone to indicate that she
had a good heart : not hard, not fierce, open to com-
passion, charitable to the poor!

" I walked away thoughtfully ; I wondered
whether his difference, his strangeness, were not
penetrating with repulsion that dull nature they
had begun by irresistibly attracting. I won-
dered. . . .''

The Doctor came to the window and looked out
at the frigid splendour of the sea, immense in
the haze, as if enclosing all the earth with all
the hearts lost among the passions of love and
fear. •

" Physiologically, now," he said, turning away
abruptly, " it was possible. It was possible."

He remained silent. Then went on —

** At all events, the next time I saw him he was
ill — ^lung trouble. He was tough, but I daresay he
was not acclimatised as well as I had supposed. It

[207]

AMY FOSTER •>

was a bad winter; and, of course, these mountain-
eers do get fits of home sicknesgj; and a state of de-
pression would make him vulnerable. He was lying
half dressed on a couch downstairs.

" A table covered with a dark oilcloth took up all
the middle of the little room. There was a wicker
cradle on the floor, a kettle spouting steam on the
hob, and some child's linen lay drying on the
fender. The room was warm, but the door opens
right into the garden, as you noticed perhaps.

" He was very feverish, and kept on muttering
to himself. She sat on a chair and looked at him
fixedly across the table with her brown, blurred
eyes. 'Why don't you have him upstairs?' I
asked. With a start and a confused stammer she
said, ' Oh ! ah ! I couldn't sit with him upstairs,
Sir.'

" I gave her certain directions ; and going out-
side, I said again that he ought to be in bed up-
stairs. She wrung her hands. ' I couldn't. I
couldn't. He keeps on saying sometliing — I don't
know what.' With the memory of all the talk
against the man that had been dinned into her ears,
I looked at her narrowly. I looked into her short-
[208]

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AMY FOSTER

sighted eyes, at her dumb eyes that once in her life
had seen an enticing shape, but seemed, staring at
me, to see nothing at all now. But I saw she was
uneasy.

" * What's the matter with him? ' she asked in a
sort of vacant trepidation. * He doesn't look very
ill. I never did see anybody look like this be-
fore. . . .'

" * Do you think,' I asked indignantly, * he is
shamming? '

" * I can't help it, sir,' she said stolidly. And
suddenly she clapped her hands and looked right
and left. * And there's the baby. I am so fright-
ened. He wanted me just now to give him the
baby. I can't understand what he says to it.'

" * Can't you ask a neighbour to come in to-
night? ' I asked.

" * Please, sir, nobody seems to care to come,' she
muttered, dully resigned all at once.

" I impressed upon her the necessity of the
greatest care, and then had to go. There was a
good deal of sickness that winter. * Oh, I hope he
won't talk ! ' she exclaimed softly just as I was go-
ing away.

[209]

AMY FOSTER

" I don't know how it is I did not see — but I
didn't. And yet, turning in my trap, I saw her
lingering before the door, very still, and as if med-
itating a flight up the miry road.

" Towards the night his fever increased.

" He tossed, moaned, and now and then muttered
a complaint. And she sat with the table between
her and the couch, watching every movement and
every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable ter-
ror, of that man she could not understand creeping
over her. She had drawn the wicker cradle close
to her feet. Tliere was nothing in her now but the
maternal instinct and tliat unaccountable fear.

" Suddenly coming to himself, parched, he de-
manded a drink of water. She did not move. She
had not understood, though he may have thought
he was speaking in English. He waited, looking at
her, burning with fever, amazed at her silence and
immobility, and then he shouted impatiently,
' Water ! Give me water ! '

" She jumped to her feet, snatched up the child,
and stood still. He spoke to her, and liis passion-
ate remonstrances only increased her fear of that
strange man. I believe he spoke to her for a long

[210]

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AMY FOSTER

time, entreating, wondering, pleading, ordering, I
suppose. She says she bore it as long as she could.
And then a gust of rage came over him.

" He sat up and called out terribly one word —
some word. Then he got up as though he hadn't
been ill at all, she says. And as in fevered dismay,
indignation, and wonder he tried to get to her
round the table, she simply opened the door and ran
out with the child in her arms. She heard him call
twice after her down the road in a terrible voice—
and fled. . • . Ah ! but you should have seen stir-
ring behind the dull, blurred glance of these eyes
the spectre of the fear which had hunted her on
that night three miles and a half to the door of Fos-
ter's cottage ! I did the next day.

" And it was I who found him lying face down
and his body in a puddle, just outside the little
wicker-gate.

" I had been called out that night to an urgent
case in the village, and on my way home at day- '
break passed by the cottage. The door stood open.
My man helped me to carry him in. We laid him
on the couch. The lamp smoked, the fire was out,
the chill of the stormy night oozed from the cheer-

[811]

AMY FOSTER
less jcilow paper on the wall. 'Anij!',! called
aloud, and my voice seemed to lose itself in the
emptiness of this tiny house as if I had cried in a
desert. He opened his ejes. ' Gone ! ' he said dis-
tinctly. ' I had only asked for water— only for a
little water. . . .'

" He was muddy. I covered him up and stood
waiting in silence, catching a painfully gasped
word now and then. They were no longer in his
own language. The fever had left him, taking
with it the heat of life. And with his panting
breast and lustrous eyes he reminded me again of a
wild creature under the net ; of a bird caught in a
snare. She had left him. She had left him — sick
— helpless — thirsty. The spear of the hunter had
entered his very soul. ' Why? ' he cried in the pen-
etrating and indignant voice of a man calling to a
responsible Maker. A gust of wind and a swish of
rain answered.

" And as I turned away to shut the door he pro-
nounced the word ' Merciful ! ' and expired.

" Eventually I certified heart-failure as the im-
mediate cause of death. His heart must have in-
deed failed him, or else he might have stood this
[212]

AMY FOSTER

night of storm and exposure, too. I closed his eyes
and drove away. Not very far from the cottage I
met Foster walking sturdily between the dripping
hedges with his collie at his heels.

" * Do you know where your daughter is ? ' I
asked.

" * Don't I ! ' he cried. * I am going to talk to
him a bit. Frightening a poor woman like this.'

" ' He won't frighten her any more,' I said.
' He is dead.'

" He struck with his stick at the mud.

" ' And there's the child.'

" Then, after thinking deeply for a while —

" * I don't know that it isn't for the best.'

" That's what he said. And she says nothing at
all now. Not a. word of him. Never. Is his im-
age as utterly gone from her jnind as his lithe and
striding figure, his carolling voice are gone from
our fields? He is no longer before her eyes to ex-
cite her imagination into a passion of love or fear ;
and his memory seems to have vanished from her
dull brain as a shadow passes away upon a white
screen. She lives in the cottage and works for Miss
Swaffer. She is Amy Foster for everybody, and

[213]

AMY FOSTER

the child is * Amy Foster's boy.' She calls him
Johnny — ^which means Little John.

" It is impossible to say whether this name re-
calls anything to her. Does she ever think of the
past? I have seen her hanging over the boy's cot
in a very passion of maternal tenderness. The lit-
tle fellow was lying on his back, a little frightened
at me, but very still, with his big black eyes, with
his fluttered air of a bird in a snare. And looking
at him I seemed to see again the other one — ^the
father, cast out mysteriously by the sea to perish
in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair."

[«U]

TO-MORRO

TO-MORROW

What was known of Captain Hagberd in the little
seaport of Colebrook was not exactly in his favour.
He did not belong to the place. He had come to
settle there under circumstances not at all myste-
rious — he used to be very communicative about
them at the time — ^but extremely morbid and un-
reasonable. He was possessed of some little money
evidently, because he bought a plot of ground, and
had a pair of ugly yellow brick cottages run up
very cheaply. He occupied one of them himself
and let the other to Josiah Carvil — blind Carvil,
the retired boat-builder — ^a man of evil repute as a
domestic tyrant.

These cottages had one wall in common, shared
in a line of iron railing dividing their front gar-
dens ; a wooden fence separated their back gardens.
Miss Bessie Carvil was allowed, as it were of right,
to throw over it the tea-cloths, blue rags, or an
apron that wanted drying.

[217]

TO-MORROW

" It rots the wood, Bessie my girl," the captain
would remark mildly, from his side of the fence,
each time he saw her exercising that privilege.

She was a tall girl; the fence was low, and
she could spread her elbows on the top. Her hands
would be red with the bit of washing she had done,
but her forearms were white and shapely, and she
would look at her father's landlord in silence — in
an informed silence which had an air of knowledge,
expectation and desire.

" It rota the wood," repeated Captain Hagberd.
" It is the only unthrifty, careless habit I know in
you. Why don't you have a clothes line out in your
back yard ? "

Miss Carvil would say nothing to this — she only
shook her head negatively. The tiny back yard
on her side had a few stone-bordered, little beds of
black earth, in which the simple flowers slie found
time to cultivate appeared somehow extravagantly
overgrown, as if belonging to an exotic clime; and
Captain Hagberd's upright, hale person, clad in
No. 1 sail-cloth from head to foot, would be emer-
ging knee-deep out of rank grass and the tall weeds
on his side of the fence. He appeared, with the col-
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TO-MORROW

our and uncouth stiffness of the extraordinary ma-
terial in which he chose to clothe himself — ^** for the
time being,'* would be his mumbled remark to any
observation on the subject — ^like a man roughened
out of granite, standing in a wilderness not big
enough for a decent billiard-room. A heavy figure
of a man of stone, with a red handsome face, a blue
wandering eye, and a great white beard flowing
to his waist and never trimmed as far as Colebrook /
knew.

Seven years before, he had seriously answered,
" Next month, I think," to the chaffing attempt to
secure his custom made by that distinguished local
wit, the Colebrook barber, who happened to be sit-
ting insolently in the tap-room of the New Inn near
the harbour, where the captain had entered to buy
an ounce of tobacco. After paying for his pur-
chase with three half -pence extracted from the cor-
ner of a handkerchief which he carried in the cuff
of his sleeve. Captain Hagberd went out. As soon
as the door was shut the barber laughed. " The
old one and the young one will be stroUing arm in
arm to get shaved in my place presently. The
tailor studl be set to work, and the barber, and the

[ 819]

TO-MORROW
candlestick maker; high old times are coming for
Colebrook, thej are coining, to be sure. It used to
be ' next week,' now it has come to ' next month,'
and BO on — soon it will be next spring, for all I
know."

Noticing a stranger listening to him with a va-
cant grin, he explained, stretching out liis legs cyn-
ically, that this queer old Hagberd, a retired coast-
ing-skipper, was waiting for the "etum of a son of
his. The boy liad been driven away from home, he
shouldn't wonder; had run away to sea and had
never been heard of since. Put to rest in Davy
Jones's locker this many a day, as hkely as not.
That old man came flying to Colebrook three
years ago all in black broadcloth (had lost his wife
lately then), getting out of a third-class smoker
as if^he devil had been at his lieels ; and the only
thing that brought him down was a letter— a hoax
probably. Some joker had written to him about a
seafaring man with some such name who was sup-
posed to be hanging about some girl or other, either
in Colebrook or in the neighbourhood. " Funny,
ain't it? " The old chap had been advertising in
the London papers for Harry Hagberd, and offer-

[aao]

TO-MORROW

ing rewards for any sort of likely information.
And the barber would go on to describe with sar-
donic gusto, how that stranger in mourning had
been seen exploring the country, in carts, on foot,
taking everybody into his confidence, visiting all
the inns and alehouses for miles around, stopping
people on the road with his questions, looking into
the very ditches almost ; first in the greatest excite-
ment, then with a plodding sort of perseverance,
growing slower and slower; and he could not even
tell you plainly how his son looked. The sailor
was supposed to be one of two that had left a tim-
ber ship, and to have been seen dangling after some
girl ; but the old man described a boy of fourteen
or so — ** a clever-looking, high-spirited boy." And
when people only smiled at this he would rub his
forehead in a confused sort of way before helilunk
off, looking offended. He found nobody, of
course; not a trace of anybody — never heard of
anything worth belief, at any rate ; but he had not
been able somehow to tear himself away from Cole-
brook.

" It was the shock of this disappointment, per-
haps, coming soon after the loss of his wife, that

[221]

TO-MORROW
had driven him crazy on that point," the barber
suggested, with an air of great psychological in-
sight. After a time the old man abandoned the ac-
tive search. His son had evidently gone away;
but he settled himself to wait. His son had been
once at least in Colobrook in preference to his na-
tive place. There must have been some reason for
it, he seemed to think, some very powerful induce-
ment, that would bring him back to Colebrook
again.

" Ha, ha, ha ! Why, of course, Colebrook.
Where else? That's the only place in the United
Kingdom for your long-lost sons. So he sold up
his old home in Colchester, and down he comes here.
Well, it's a craze, like any other. Wouldn't catch
me going crazy over any of my youngsters clear-
ing out. I've got eight of them at home." The
barber was showing off his strength of mind in the
midst of a laugliter that shook the tap-room.

Strange, though, that sort of thing, he would
confess, with the frankness of a superior intelli-
gence, seemed to be catching. His establishment,
for instance, was near the harbour, and whenever a
eailorman came in for a hair-cut or a shave — If it
[222]

TO-MORROW

was a strange face he couldn't help thinking di-
rectly, " Suppose he's the son of old Hagberd ! "
He laughed at himself for it. It was a strong
craze. He could remember the time when the whole
town was full of it. But he had his hopes of the
old chap yet. He would cure him by a course of
judicious chaffing. He was watching the progress
of the treatment. Next week — ^next month — next
year ! When the old skipper had put off the date
of that return till next year, he would be well on
his way to not saying any more, about it. In other
matters he was quite rational, so this, too, was
bound to come. Such was the barber's firm opin-
ion.

Nobody had ever contradicted him ; his own hair
had gone grey since that time, and Captain Hag-
berd's beard had turned quite white, and had ac-
quired a majestic flow over the No. 1 canvas suit,
which he had made for himself secretly with tarred
twine, and had assumed suddenly, coming out in
it one fine morning, whereas the evening before he
had been seen going home in his mourning of
broadcloth. It caused a sensation in the High
Street — shopkeepers coming to their doors, people

[22S]

TO-MORROW
in the houses snatching up their hats to run out —
a stir at which he seemed strangely surprised at
first, and then scared ; but his only answer to the
wondering questions was that startled and evasive,
" For the present."

That sensation had been forgotten, long ago;
and Captain Hagberd himself, if not forgotten,
had come to be disregarded — the penalty of daili-
ness — as the sun itself is disregarded unless it
makes its power felt heavily. Captain Hagberd's
movements showed no infirmity: he walked stiffly
in his suit of canvas, a quaint and remarkable fig-
ure ; only his eyes wandered more furtively perhaps
than of yore. His manner abroad had lost its ex-
citable watchfulness; it had become puzzled and
diffident, as though he had suspected that there
was somewhere about him something slightly com-
promising, some embarrassing oddity ; and yet had
remained unable to discover what on earth this
something wrong could be.

He was unwilling now to talk with the townsfolk.
He had earned for himself the reputation of an
awful skinflint, of a miser in the matter of living.
He mumbled regretfully in the shops, bought ia-

[28*]

J

TO-MORROW

ferior scraps of meat after long hesitations; and
discouraged all allusions to his costume. It was
as the barber had foretold. For all one could tell,
he had recovered already from the disease of hope ;
and only Miss Bessie Carvil knew that he said noth-
ing about his son's return because with him it was
no longer " next week," " next month,'* or even
" next year.'' It was " to-morrow."

In their intimacy of back yard and front gar-
den he talked with her paternally, reasonably, and
dogmatically, with a touch of arbitrariness. They
met on the ground of unreserved confidence, which
was authenticated by an affectionate wink now and
then. Miss Carvil had come to look forward rather
to these winks. At first they had discomposed her :
the poor fellow was mad. Afterwards she had
learned to laugh at them: there was no harm in
him. Now she was aware of an unacknowledged,
pleasurable, incredulous emotion, expressed by a
faint blush. He winked not in the least vulgarly ;
his thin red face with a well-modelled curved nose,
had a sort of distinction — ^the more so that when he
talked to her he looked with a steadier and more in-
telligent glance. A handsome, hale, upright, ca-'

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TO-MORROW
pable man, with a white beard. You did not think
of his age. His son, he affirmed, had resembled
him amazingly from his earliest babyhood.

Harry would be one-and-thirty next July, he
declared. Proper age to get married with a nice,
sensible girl that could appreciate a good home.
He was a very high-spirited boy. High-spirited
husbands were the easiest to manage. These mean,
soft chaps, that you would think butter wouldn't
melt in their mouths, were the ones to make a wom-
an thoroughly miserable. And there was nothing
like a home — a fireside — a good roof; no turning
out of your warm bed in all sorts of weather. " Eh,
my dear? "

Captain Hagberd had been one of those sailors
that pursue their calling within sight of land. One
of the many children of a bankrupt farmer, he had
been apprenticed hurriedly to a coasting skipper,
and had remained on the coast all his sea life. It
must have been a hard one at first: he had never
taken to it ; his affection turned to the land, with
its innumerable houses, with its quiet lives gathered
round its firesides. Many sailors feel and profess
a rational dislike for the sea, but his was a pro-
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TO-MORROW

found and emotional animosity — ^as if the love of
the stabler element had been bred into him through
many generations.

" People did not know what they let their boys in
for when they let them go to sea," he expounded to
Bessie. " As soon make convicts of them at once."
He did not believe you ever got used to it. The
weariness of such a life got worse as you got older.
What sort of trade was it in which more than half
your time you did not put your foot inside your
house? Directly you got out to sea you had no
means of knowing what went on at home. One
might have thought him weary of distant voyages ;
and the longest he had ever made had lasted a fort-
night, of which the most part had been spent at
anchor, sheltering from the weather. As soon as
his wife had inherited a house and enough to live on
(from a bachelor uncle who had made some money
in the coal business) he threw up his command of
an East-coast collier with a feeling as though he
had escaped from the galleys. After all these years
he might have counted on the fingers of his two
hands all the days he had been out of sight of Eng-
land. He had never known what it was to be 01/

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i

TO-MORROW

of soundings. *' I have never been further than
eighty fathoms from tlie land," was one of hia
boasts.

Bessie Carvil heard all these things. In front of
their cottage grew an under-sized ash : and on sum-
mer afternoons she would bring out a chair on the
grass-plot and sit down with her sewing. Captain
Hagberd, in his canvas suit, leaned on a spade. He
dug every day in his front plot. He turned it over
and over several times every year, but was not go-
ing to plant anything " just at present."

To Bessie Carvil he would state more explicitly :
" Not till our Harry comes home to-morrow." And
she had heard this formula of hope so often that it
only awakened the vaguest pity in her heart for
that hopeful old man.

Everything was put off in that way, and every-
thing was being prepared likewise for to-morrow.
There was a boxful of packets of various flower-
eeeds to choose from, for the front garden. " He
will doubtless let you have your say about that, my
dear," Captain Hagberd intimated to her across
the railing.

[228]

TO-MORROW

Miss Bessie's head remained bowed over her
work. She had heard all this so many times. But
now and then she would rise, lay down her sewing,
and come slowly to the fence. There was a charm
in these gentle ravings. He was determined that
his son should not go away again for the want of a
home all ready for him. He had been filling the
other cottage with all sorts of furniture. She im-
agined it all new, fresh with varnish, piled up as
in a warehouse. There would be tables wrapped
up in sacking; rolls of carpets thick and vertical
like fragments of columns, the gleam of white mar-
ble tops in the dimness of the drawn blinds. Cap-
tain Hagberd always described his purchases to
her, carefully, as to a person having a legitimate
interest in them. The overgrown yard of his cot-
tage could be laid over with concrete . . • after
to-morrow.

" We may just as well do away with the fence.
You could have your drying-line out, quite clear of
your flowers." He winked, and she would blush
faintly.

This madness that had entered her life through
the kind impulses of her heart had reasonable de-

[229]

tails

TO-MORROW

Whftt if some day his son returned? But

she could not even be quite sure that he ever had a
8on; and if he existed anywhere he had been too
long away. When Captain Hagberd got excited
in his talk slie would steady him by a pretence of
belief, laughing a little to salve her conscience.

Only once she had tried pityingly to throw some
doubt on that hope doomed to disappointment, but
the eflfect of her attempt had scared her very much.
All at once over that man's face there came an ex-
pression of horror and incredulity, as though he
had seen a crack open out in the firmament.

" You — you — you don't think he's drowned! "

For a moment he seemed to her ready to go out
of his mind, for in his ordinary state she thought
him more sane than people gave him credit for.
On that occasion the violence of the emotion waa
followed by a most paternal and complacent re-
covery.

*' Don't alarm yourself, my dear," he said a ht-
tle cunningly : " the sea can't keep him. He does
not belong to it. None of us Hagberds ever did
belong to it. Look at me ; I didn't get drowned.
Moreover, he isn't a sailor at all ; and if he is not a
[S30]

TO-MORROW

saHor he's bound to come back. There's nothing
to prevent him coming back. . . /'

His eyes began to wander.

" To-morrow."

She never tried again, for fear the man should
go out of his mind on the spot. He depended on
her. She seemed the only sensible person in the
town; and he would congratulate himself frankly
before her face on having secured such a level-
headed wife for his son. The rest of the town^ he
confided to her once, in a fit of temper, was certainly
queer. The way they looked at you — the way they
talked to you ! He had never got on with any one
in the place. Didn't like the people. He would
not have left his own country if it had not been
clear that his son had taken a fancy to Colebrook.

She humoured him in silence, listening patiently
by the fence; crocheting with downcast eyes.
Blushes came with difficulty on her dead-white
complexion, imder the negligently twisted opu-
lence of mahogany-coloured hair. Her father was
frankly carroty.

She had a full figure ; a tired, unref reshed face.
When Captain Hagberd vaunted the necessity and

[881]

TO-MORROW
propriety of a home and the delights of one's own
fireside, she smiled a little, with her iips only. Her
home delights had been confined to the nursing of
her father during the ten best years of her life.

A bestial roaring coming out of an upstairs win-
dow would interrupt their talk- She would begin
at once to roll up her crochet-work or fold her sew-
ing, without the slightest sign of haste. Mean-
while the howls and roars of her name would go on,
making the fishermen strolling upon the sea-wall
on the other side of the road turn their heads to-
wards the cottages. She would go in slowly at the
front door, and a moment afterwards there would
fall a profound silence. Presently she would re-
appear, leading by the hand a man, gross and un-
wieldy hke a hippopotamus, with a bad-tempered,
surly face.

He was a widowed boat-builder, whom blindness
had overtaken years before in the full flush of busi-
ness. He behaved to his daughter as if she had
been responsible for its incurable character. He
had been heard to bellow at the top of his voice,
as if to defy Heaven, that he did not care: he had
made enough money to have ham and eggs for his
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TO-MORROW

breakfast every morning. He thanked Grod for it,
in a fiendish tone as though he were cursing.

Captain Hagberd had been so unfavourably im-
pressed by his tenant, that once he told Miss Bes-
sie, " He is a very extravagant fellow, my dear."

She was knitting that day, finishing a pair of
socks for her father, who expected her to keep up
the supply dutifully. She hated knitting, and, as
she was just at the heel part, she had to keep her
eyes on her needles.

" Of course it isn't as if he had a son to provide
for," Captain Hagberd went on a little vacantly.
" Girls, of course, don't require so much — ^h'm —
h'm. They don't run away from home, my dear."

" No," said Miss Bessie, quietly.

Captain Hagberd, amongst the mounds of
turned-up earth, chuckled. With his maritime rig,
his weather-beaten face, his beard of Father Nep-
tune, he resembled a deposed sea-god who had ex-
changed the trident for the spade.

" And he must look upon you as already pro-
vided for, in a manner. That's the best of it with
the girls. The husbands . . ." He winked. Miss
Bessie, absorbed in her knitting, coloured faintly.

[233]

TO-MORROW

" Bessie ! my hat ! " old Carvil bellowed out sud-
denly. He had been sitting under the tree route
and raotionlesH, like an idol of some remarkably
monstrous superstition. He never opened his
mouth but to howl for her, at her, sometimes about
her; and then he did not moderate the terms of his
abuse. Her system was never to answer him at all;
and he kept up his shouting till he got attended to
— till she shook him by the arm, or thrust the
mouthpiece of his pipe between his teeth. He was
one of the few blind people who smoke. When he
felt the hat being put on his head he stopped his
noise at once. Then he rose, and they passed to-
gether through the gate.

He weighed heavily on her arm. During their
slow, toilful walks she appeared to be dragging
with her for a penance the burden of that infirm
bulk. Usually they crossed the road at once (the
cottages stood in the fields near the harbour, two
hundred yards away from the end of the street),
and for a long, long time they would remain in
view, ascending imperceptibly the flight of wooden
steps that led to the top of the sea-wall. It ran
on from east to west, shutting out the Channd like
[S84]

TO-MORROW

a neglected railway embankment, on which no train
had ever rolled within memory of man. Groups
of sturdy fishermen would emerge upon the sky,
walk along for a bit, and sink without haste. Their
brown nets, like the cobwebs of gigantic spiders,
lay on the shabby grass of the slope ; and, looking
up from the end of the street, the people of the
town would recognise the two Carvils by the creep-
ing slowness of their gait. Captain Hagberd, pot-
tering aimlessly about his cottages, would raise his
head to see how they got on in their promenade.

He advertised still in the Sunday papers for
Harry Hagberd. These sheets were read in for-
eign parts to the end of the world, he informed Bes-
sie. At the same time he seemed to think that his
son was in England — so near to Colebrook that he
would of course turn up " to-morrow." Bessie,
without committing herself to that opinion in so
many words, argued that in that case the expense
of advertising was unnecessary ; Captain Hagberd
had better spend that weekly half-crown on him-
self. She declared she did not know what he lived
on. Her argumentation would puzzle him and cast

[236]

TO-MORROW

him down for a time. " They ail do it," he pointed
out. There was a whole column devoted to appeals
after missing relatives. He would bring the news-
paper to show her. He and his wife had advertised
for years; only she was an impatient woman. The
news from Colebrook had arrived the very day after
her funeral; if she had not been so impatient she
might have been here now, with no more than one
day more to wait. " You are not an impatient
woman, my dear."

" I've no patience with you sometimes," she
would say.

If he still advertised for his son he did not offer
rewards for information any more; for, with the
muddled lucidity of a mental derangement he had
reasoned himself into a conviction as clear as day-
light that he had already attained all tliat could be
expected in that way. What more could he want?
Colebrook was the place, and there was no need to
ask for more. Miss Carvil praised him for his good
sense, and he was soothed by the part she took in
his hope, which had become his delusion; in that
idea which bhnded his mind to truth and probabil-
ity, just as the other old man in the other cottage
[»36]

TO-MORROW

had been made blind, by another disease, to the
light and beauty of the world.

But anything he could interpret as a doubt —
any coldness of assent, or even a simple inattention
to the development of his projects of a home with
his returned son and his son's wife — ^would irritate
him into flings and jerks and wicked side glances.
He would dash his spade into the ground and walk
to and fro before it. Miss Bessie called it his tan-
trums. She shook her finger at him. Then, when
she came out again, after he had parted with her
in anger, he would watch out of the corner of his
eyes for the least sign of encouragement to ap-
proach the iron railings and resume his fatherly
and patronising relations.

For all their intimacy, which had lasted some
years now, they had never talked without a fence
or a railing between them. He described to her all
the splendours accumulated for the setting-up of
their housekeeping, but had never invited her to an
inspection. No human eye was to behold them till
Harry had his first look. In fact, nobody had ever
been inside his cottage; he did his own housework,
and he guarded his son's privilege so jealously that

[287]

TO-MORROW

the small objects of domestic use he bought some-
times in the town were smuggled rapidly across the
front garden under his canvas coat. Then, coming
out, he would remark apologetically, " It was only
a small kettle, my dear."

And, if not too tired with her drudgery, or wor-
ried beyond endurance by her father, she would
laugh at him with a blush, and say : " That's all
right. Captain Hagberd ; I am not impatient."

*' Well, my dear, you haven't long to wait now,"
he would answer with a sudden bashfulness, and
looking uneasily, as though he had suspected that
there was something wrong somewhere.

Every Monday she paid him his rent over the
railings. He clutched the shillings greedily. He
grudged every penny he had to spend on his main-
tenance, and when he left her to make liis purchases
his bearing changed as soon as he got into the
street. Away from the sanction of her pity, he felt
himself exposed without defence. He brushed the
walls with his shoulder. He mistrusted the queer-
ness of the people; yet, by then, even the town
children had left off calling after him, and the
tradesmen served him without a word. The alight-
[838]

TO-MORROW

est allusion to his clothing had the power to puzzli
and frighten especially, as if it were something
utterly unwarranted and incomprehensible.

In the autxmin, the driving rain drummed on his
sailcloth suit saturated almost to the stiffness of
sheet-iron, with its surface flowing with water.
When the weather was too bad, he retreated under
the tiny porch, and, standing close against the
door, looked at his spade left planted in the middle
of the yard. The ground was so much dug up all
over, that as the season advanced it turned to a
quagmire. When it froze hard, he was disconso-
late. What would Harry say? And as he could
not have so much of Bessie's company at that time
of the year, the roars of old Carvil, that came muf-
fled through the closed windows, calling her in-
doors, exasperated him greatly.

" Why don't that extravagant fellow get you a
servant ? '* he asked impatiently one mild after-
noon. She had thrown something over her head to
run out for a while.

" I don't know," said the pale Bessie, wearily,
staring away with her heavy-lidded, grey, and un-
expectant glance. There were always smudgy

[239]

TO-MORROW
shadows under her eyes, and she did not seem able
to see any change or any end to her life.

" You wait till you get married, my dear," said
her only friend, drawing closer to the fence.
*' Harry will get you one."

His hopeful craze seemed to mock her own want
of hope with so bitter an aptness that in her ner-
vous irritation she could have screamed at him out-
light. But she only said in self-moclcery, and
speaking to him as though he had been sane,
" Why, Captain Hagberd, your son may not even
want to look at me."

He flung his head back and laughed his throaty
affected cackle of anger.

" What ! That boy? Not want to look at the
only sensible girl for miles around? What do you
think I am here for, my dear — my dear — my dear?
. . . What? You wait. You just wait. You'll
see to-morrow. I'll soon "

" Bessie ! Bessie ! Bessie ! " howled old Carvil in-
side. " Bessie ! — my pipe ! " That fat blind man
had given himself up to a very lust of laziness. He
would not hft his hand to reach for the things she
took care to leave at his very elbow. He would not
[240]

TO-MORROW

move a limb ; he would not rise from his chair, he
would not put one foot before another, in that par-
lour (where he knew his way as well as if he had his
sight), without calling her to his side and hanging
all his atrocious weight on her shoulder. He would
not eat one single mouthful of food without her
close attendance. He had made himself helpless
beyond his a£9iction, to enslave her better. She
stood still for a moment, setting her teeth in the
dusk, then turned and walked slowly indoors.

Captain Hagberd went back to his spade. The
shouting in Carvil's cottage stopped, and after a
while the window of the parlour downstairs was lit
up. A man coming from the end of the street with
a firm leisurely step passed on, but seemed to have
caught sight of Captain Hagberd, because he
turned back a pace or two. A cold white light lin-
gered in the western sky. The man leaned over the
gate in an interested manner.

" You must be Captain Hagberd," he said, with
easy assurance.

The old man spun round, pulling out his spade,
startled by the strange voice.

" Yes, I am,'' he answered nervously.

[241]

TO-MORROW

The other, smiling straight at liim, uttered very
bIowIj : " You've been advertising for your son, I
believe? "

" My son Harry," mumbled Captain Hagberd,
off his guard for once. " He's coming home to- ,
morrow."

" The devil he is ! " The stranger marvelled
greatly, and then went on, with only a slight
change of tone : " You've grown a beard like
Father Christmas himself."

Captain Hagberd drew a little nearer, and
leaned forward over his spade, " Go your way,"
be said, resentfully and timidly at the same time,
because he was always afraid of being laughed at.
Every mental state, even madness, has its equi-
librium based upon self-esteem. Its disturbance
causes unhappiness ; and Captain Hagberd lived
amongst a scheme of settled notions wliich it pained
him to feel disturbed by people's grins. Yes, peo-
ple's grins were awful. They hinted at something
wrong; but what? He could not tell; and that
stranger was obviously grinning— had come on
purpose to grin. It was bad enough on the streets,
but he had never before been outraged like this.

J

TO-MORROW

The stranger, unaware how near he was of hav-
ing his head laid open with a spade, said seriously :
"I am not trespassing where I stand, am I? I
fancy there's something wrong about your news.
Suppose you let me come in."

"* You come in ! " murmured old Hagberd, with
inexpressible horror.

" I could give you some real information about
your son — the very latest tip, if you care to
hear."

" No," shouted Hagberd. He began to pace
wildly to and fro, he shouldered his spade, he ges-
ticulated with his other arm. " Here's a fellow —
a grinning fellow, who says there's something
wrong. I've got more information than you're
aware of. I've all the information I want. I've
had it for years — for years — for years — enough
to last me till to-morrow. Let you come in, indeed !
What would Harry say? "

Bessie Carvil's figure appeared in black silhou-
ette on the parlour window ; then, with the sound of
an opening door, flitted out before the other cot-
tage, all black, but with something white over
her head. These two voices beginning to talk sud-

[ MS ]

TO-MORROW
denlj outside (she had heard them indoors) had
given her such an emotion that she could not utter
a sound.

Captain Hagberd seemed to be trying to find his
way out of a cage. His feet squelched in the pud-
dles left by his industry. He stumbled in the holes
of the ruined grass-plot. He ran blindly against
the fence.

" Here, steady a bit ! " said the man at the gat£,
gravely stretching his arm over and catching him
by the sleeve. " Somebody's been trying to get at
you. Hallo! what's this rig you've got on? Storm
canvas, by George ! " He had a big laugh.
" Well, you are a character ! "

Captain Hagberd jerked himself free, and began
to back away shrinkingly. " For the present," he
muttered, in a crestfallen tone.

" What's the matter with liim.' " The stranger
addressed Bessie with the utmost familiarity, in a
deliberate, explanatory tone. " I didn't want to
startle the old man." He lowered his voice as
though he had known her for years. " I dropped
into a barber's on my way, to get a twopenny
shave, and they told me there he was something of

TO-MORROW

a character. The old man has been a character all
his Ufe."

Captain Hagberd, daunted by the allusion to his
clothing, had retreated Inside, taking his spade
with him ; and the two at the gate, startled by the
unexpected slamming of the door, heard the bolts
being shot^ the snapping of the lock, and the echo
of an affected gurgling laugh within.

" I didn't want to upset him," the man said,
after a short silence. " What's the meaning of all
this? He isn't quite crazy."

" He has been worrying a long time about his
lost son," said Bessie, in a low, apologetic tone.

" Well, I am his son."

"Harry!" she cried — ^and was profoundly si-
lent.

"Know my name? Friends with the old man,
eh?"

" He's our landlord," Bessie faltered out, catch-
ing hold of the iron railing.

"Owns both them rabbit-hutches, does he?"
commented young Hagberd, scornfully; " just the
thing he would be proud of. Can you tell me who's
that chap coming to-morrow? You must know

[246]

TO-MORROW
Bomctliing of it. I tell you, it's a swindle on the old
man — nothing else."

She did not answer, helpless before an insur-
mountable difficulty, appalled before the necessity,
the impossibility and the dread of an explanation
in which she and madness seemed involved together.

" Oh^ — I am so sorry," she murmured.

"What's the matter?" he said, with serenity.
*' You needn't be afraid of upsetting me. It's the
other fellow that'll be upset wlicn he least expects
it. I don't care a hang; but there will be some fun
when he shows his mug to-morrow. I don't care
that for the old man's pieces, but right is right.
You shall see me put a head on that coon — whoever
he is!"

He had come nearer, and towered above her on
the other side of the railings. He glanced at her
hands. He fancied she was trembling, and it oc-
curred to him that she had her part perhaps in that
little game that was to be sprung on his old man
to-morrow. He had come just In time to spoil their
sport. He was entertained by the idea — scornful
of the baffled plot. But all his life he had been full
of indulgence for all sorts of women's tricks. She
[246]

J

TO-MORROW

really was trembling very much; her wrap had
slipped off her head. " Poor devil ! '* he thought.
" Never mind about that chap. I daresay he'll
change his mind before to-morrow. But what
about me? I can't loaf about the gate til the morn-

• 99

She burst out : " It is you — ^you yourself that he's
waiting for. It is you who come to-morrow."

He murmured. " Oh ! It's me ! " blankly, and
they seemed to become breathless together. Ap-
parently he was pondering over what he had heard ;
then, without irritation, but evidently perplexed,
he said : " I don't understand. I hadn't written or
anything. It's my chum who saw the paper and
told me— this very morning. ... Eh? what?"

He bent his ear ; she whispered rapidly, and he
listened for a while, muttering the words " yes "
and " I see " at times. Then, " But why won't to-
day do ? " he queried at last.

"You didn't understand me ! " she exclaimed,
impatiently. The clear streak of light under the
clouds died out in the west. Again he stooped
slightly to hear better ; and the deep night buried
everything of the whispering woman and the

[247]

TO-MORROW
attentive man, except the familiar contiguity of
their faces, with its air of secrecy and caress.

He squared his shoulders ; the broad-brimmed
shadow of a hat sat cavaHerly on his head. ** Awk-
ward this, eh? " he appealed to her, " To-morrow?
Well, well ! Never heard tell of anything like this.
It's all to-morrow, then, without any sort of to-day,
as far as I can see."

She remained still and mute.

" And you have been encouraging tliis funny
notion," he said.

" I never contradicted him."

" Why didn't you? "

"What for should I?" she defended herself.
" It would only have made him miserable. He
would have gone out of his mind."

"His mind!" he muttered, and heard a short
nervous laugh from her.

" Where was the harm.' Was I to quarrel with
the poor old man ? It was easier to half believe it
myself."

" Aye, aye," he meditated, intelligently. " I
suppose the old chap got around you somehow with
his soft talk. You are good-hearted."
[218]

TO-MORROW

Her hands moved up in the dark nervously.
*^ And it might have been true. It was true. It
has come. Here it is. This is the to-morrow we
have been waiting for."

She drew a breath, and he said, good-humour-
edly : " Aye, with the door shut. I wouldn't care
if . . . And you think he could be brought round
to recognise me . . . Eh? What? . . . You
could do it? In a week you say? H'm, I daresay
you could — ^but do you think I could hold out a
week in this dead-alive place? Not me! I want
either hard work, or an all-fired racket, or more
space than there is in the whole of England. I
have been in this place, though, once before, and for
more than a week. The old man was advertising
for me then, and a chum I had with me had a no-
tion of getting a couple of quid out of him by writ-
ing a lot of silly nonsense in a letter. That lark did
not come off, though. We had to clear out — and
none too soon. But this time I've a chimi waiting
for me in London, and besides • . ."

Bessie Carvil was breathing quickly.

" What if I tried a knock at the door? " he sug-
gested.

[249]

TO-MORROW

" Try," she said.

Captain Hagberd's gate squeaked, and the shad-
ow of the son moved on, then stopped with another
deep laugh in the throat, like the father's, only
soft and gentle, thrilling to the woman's heart,
awakening to her ears.

" He isn't frisky — is he? I would be afraid to
lay hold of him. The chaps are always teUing me
I don't know my own strength,"

" He's the most harniless creature that ever
lived," she interrupted.

" You wouldn't say so if you had seen him chas-
ing me upstairs with a hard leather strap," he said;
*' I haven't forgotten it in sixteen years."

She got warm from head to foot under another
soft, subdued laugh. At the rat-tat-tat of the
knocker her heart flew into her moutli.

" Hey, dad ! Let me in. I am Harry, I am.
Straight ! Come back home a day too soon."

One of the windows upstairs ran up.

" A grinning, information fellow," said the voice
of old Hagberd, up in the darkness. " Don't you
have anything to do with him. It will spoil every-
thing."

[250]

J

TO-MORROW

She heard Harry Hagberd say, " Hallo, dad,"
then a clanging clatter. The window rumbled
down, and he stood before her again.

" It's just like old times. Nearly walloped the
life out of me to stop me going away, and now I
come back he throws a confounded shovel at my
head to keep me out. It grazed my shoulder.'*

She shuddered.

" I wouldn't care," he began, " only I spent my
last shillings on the railway fare and my last two-
pence on a shave — out of respect for the old man."

"Are you really Harry Hagberd? " she asked,
he said, jovially. " Prove with what? What do I

" Can I prove it? Can any one else prove it? "
he said jovially. " Prove with what? What do I
want to prove? There isn't a single comer in the
world, barring England, perhaps, where you could
not find some man, or more likely woman, that
would remember me for Harry Hagberd. I am
more like Harry Hagberd than any man alive ; and
I can prove it to you in a minute, if you will let me
step inside your gate."

" Come in," she said.

He entered then the front garden of the Carvils.

r 261 ]

k

TO-MORROW

His tall shadow strode with a swagger : she turned
her back on the window and waited, watching the
fihape, of which the footfalls seemed the most mate-
rial part. The light fell on a tilted hat ; a power-
ful shoulder, that seemed to cleave the darkness ;
on a leg stepping out. He swung about and stood
Btill, facing the illuminated parlour window at her
hack, turning his head from side to side, laughing
softly to himself.

" Just fancy, for a minute, the old man's beard
stuck on to my chin. Hey ? Now say. I was the
very spit of him from a boy,"

" It's true," she murmured to herself.

" And that's about as far as it goes. He was al-
ways one of your domestic characters. Why, I re-
member how he used to go about looking very sick
for three doys before he had to leave home on one
of his trips to South Shields for coal. He had a
standing charter from the gas-works. You would
tliink he was off on a whaling cruise — three years
and a tail. Ha, ha ! Not a bit of it. Ten days on
the outside. The Skimmer of the Seas was a smart
craft. Fine name, wasn't it? Mother's uncle
owned her. . . ."

[252]

TO-MORROW

He Interrupted himself, and in a lowered voice,
** Did he ever tell you what mother died of ? *' he
asked.

** Yes," said Miss Bessie, bitterly ; " from impa*
tience."

He made no sound for a while; then brusquely:
" They were so afraid I would turn out badly that
they fairly drove me away. Mother nagged at me
for being idle, and the old man said he would cut
my soul out of my body rather than let me go to
sea. Well, it looked as if he would do it too — so I
went. It looks to me sometimes as if I had been
born to them by a mistake — in that other hutch of
a house."

" Where ought you to have been bom by
rights? " Bessie Carvil interrupted him, defiantly.

" In the open, upon a beach, on a windy night,"
he said, quick as lightning. Then he mused slowly.
" They were characters, both of them, by Greorge ;
and the old man keeps it up well — don't he? A
damned shovel on the ^Hark! who's that mak-
ing that row? ^ Bessie^ Bessie.' It's in your
house."

** It's for me," she said, with indifference.

[268]

TO-MORROW

He stepped aside, out of the streak of light.
** Your husband? " he inquired, with the tone of a
man accustomed to unlawful trysts. " Fine voice
for a ship's deck in a thundering squall."

" No ; my father. I am not married."

** You seem a fine girl, Miss Bessie, dear," he said
at ont-e.

She turned her face away.

"Oh, I say, — what's up? Who's murdering
him? "

" He wants his tea," She faced him, still and
tall, with averted head, with her hands hanging
clasped before her.

" Hadn't you better go in? " he suggested, after
watching for a while the nape of her neck, a patch
of dazzling wliite skin and soft shadow above the
sombre line of lier shoulders. Her wrap had slipped
down to her elbows. " You'll have all the town
coming out presently. I'll wait here a bit."

Her wrap fell to the ground, and he stooped to
pick it up; she had vanished. He threw it over
his arm, and approaching the window squarely he
saw a monstrous form of a fat man in an arm-
chair, an unshaded lamp, tlie yawning of an enor-
[254]

'1 au truux* i

TO-MORROW

mous mouth in a big flat face encircled by a ragged
halo of hair — Miss Bessie's head and bust. The
shouting stopped; the blind ran dciwn. He lost
himself in thinking how awkward it was. Father
mad ; no getting into the house. No money to get
back ; a hungry chum in Lowion who would begin
to think he had been given the go-by. " Damn ! "
he muttered. He could break the door in, cer-
tainly; but they would perhaps bundle him into
chokey for that without asking questions — no great
matter, only he was confoundedly afraid of being
locked up, even in mistake. He turned cold at the
thought. He stamped his feet on the sod-
den grass.

"What are you? — a sailor?'* said an agitated
voice.

She had flitted out, a shadow herself, attracted
by the reckless shadow waiting under the wall of
her home.

" Anything. Enough of a sailor to be worth
my salt before the mast. Came home that way this
time."

" Where do you come from? '' she asked.

" Right away from a jolly good spree," he said,

[266]

TO-MORROW

" by the London train—

Ough ! I hate being I

up

in a train. I don't mind a house so I

much."

" Ah,"

' she said ; " that's lucky."

1 a house you can at any time open
the blamed door and walk away straight befora
you."

" And never come back ? "

" Not for sixteen years at least," he laughed.
" To a rabbit hutch, and get a confounded old
shovel . . .*'

" A ship 18 not so very big," she taunted.

** No, but the sea is great,"

She dropped her head, and as if her ears had
been opened to the voices of the world, she heard,
beyond the rampart of sea-wall, the swell of yester-
day's gale breaking on the beach with monotonous
and solemn vibrations, as if all the earth had been
a tolling bell.

" And then, why, a ship's a ship. You love her
and leave her; and a voyage isn't a marriage." He
quoted the sailor's saying lightly.

" It is not a marriage," she whispered,

" I never took a false name, and I've
[266]

never yet ^^^|

TO-MORROW

told a lie to a woman. What lie ? Why, the lie-

Take me or leave me, I say: and if you take me,
then it is . . ." He himimed a snatch very low,
leaning against the wall.

Oh, ho, ho Rio !
And fare thee well,
My bonnie young girl,
Were bound to Bio Grande,

" Capstan song," he explained. Her teeth chat-
tered.

" You are cold,'* he said.* " Here's that affair
of yours I picked up." She felt his hands about
her, wrapping her closely. " Hold the ends to-
gether in front," he commanded.

" What did you come here for? " she asked, re-
pressing a shudder.

" Five quid," he answered, promptly. " We let
our spree go on a little too long and got hard up."

** You've been drinking? " she said.

" Blind three days ; on purpose. I am not given
that way — don't you think. There's nothing and
nobody that can get over me unless I like. I can

[267]

i

TO-MORROW

be as steady as a rock. My chum sees the paper
this morning, and says he to me : ' Go on, Harry :
loving parent, Thai's five quid sure.' So we
scraped all our pockets for the fare. Devil of a
lark!"

*' You have a hard heart, I am afraid," she
sighed.

"What for? For ruuning away? Why! he
wanted to make a lawyer's clerk of me — just to
please himself. Master in his own house; and my
poor mother egged him on — for my good, I sup-
pose. Well, then — so long; and I went. No, I
tell you : the day I cleared out, I was all black and
blue from his great fondness for me. Ah! he was
always a bit of a character. Look at that shovel
now. Off his chump? Not much. That's just
exactly like my dad. He wants me here just to
have somebody to order about. However, we two
were hard up ; and what's five quid to him — once
in sixteen hard years.'' "

" Oh, but I am sorry for you. Did you never
want to come back home? "

" Be a lawyer's clerk and rot here — in some such
place as this? " he cried in contempt. " What! if

[258]

A

TO-MORROW

the old man set me up in a home to-day, I would
kick it down about my ears — or else die there be-
fore the third day was out.*'

" And where else is it that you hope to die? "
" In the bush somewhere ; in the sea ; on a blamed
mountain-top for choice. At home? Yes! the
world's my home ; but I expect I'll die in a hospital
some day. What of that? Any place is good
enough, as long as I've lived ; and I've been every-
thing you can think of almost but a tailor or a
soldier. I've been a boundary rider; I've sheared
sheep; and humped my swag; and harpooned a
whale. I've rigged ships, and prospected for gold,
and skinned dead bullocks, — and turned my back
on more money than the old man would have
scraped in his whole life. Ha, ha ! "

He overwhelmed her. She pulled herself to-
gether and managed to utter, " Time to rest

now."

He straightened himself up, away from the wall,
and in a severe voice said, " Time to go."

But he did not move. He leaned back again,
and hummed thoughtfully a bar or two of an out-
landish tUTIA.

[269]

TO-MORROW

She felt as if she were about to crj. " That's
another of jour cruel songs," she said.

" Learned it in Mexico — in Sonora." He talked
easily. " It is the song of the Gambucinos. You
don't know? The song of restless men. Nothing
could hold them in one place — not even a woman.
You used to meet one of them now and again, in
the old days, on the edge of the gold country, awa^
north there beyond the Rio Gila. I've seen it. A
prospecting engineer in Mazatlan took me along
with him to help look after the waggons. A
sailor's a handy chap to have about you anyhow.
It's all a desert : cracks in the earth that you can't
see the bottom of; and mountains — sheer rocks
standing up high like walls and church spires, only
a hundred times bigger. The valleys are full of
boulders and black stones. There's not a blade of
grass to see; and the sun sets more red over that
country than I liave seen it anywhere — blood-red
and angry. It is fine."

"You do not want to go back there again?"
die stammered out.

He laughed a little. " No. That's the blamed
gold country. It gave me the shivers sometimes

[260]

^

TO-MORROW

to look at it — and we were a big lot of men together,
mind; but these Gambucinos wandered alone.
They knew that country before anybody had ever
heard of it. They had a sort of gift for prospect-
ing, and the fever of it was on them too ; and they
did not seem to want the gold very much. They
would iSnd some rich spot, and then turn their backs
on it; pick up perhaps a little — enough for a
spree — and then be oif again, looking for more.
They never stopped long where there were houses ;
they had no wife, no chick, no home, never a chum.
You couldn't be friends with a Gambucino; they
were too restless — ^here to-day, and gone, God
knows where, to-morrow. They told no one of
their finds, and there has never been a Gambucino
well oif. It was not for the gold they cared ; it was
the wandering about looking for it in the stony
country that got into them and wouldn't let them
rest ; so that no woman yet born could hold a Gam-
bucino for more than a week. That's what the
song says. It's all about a pretty girl that tried
hard to keep hold of a Gambucino lover, so that he
should bring her lots of gold. No fear! Off he
went, and she never saw him again.'

[861]

99

TOMORROW

" What became of herP " she breathed c

" The Bong don't tell. Cried a bit, I daresay.
They were the fellows: kiss and go. But it's the
looking for a thing — a something . . . Sometim
I think I am a sort of Gambucino myself."

" No woman can hold you, then," she began in
s brazen voice, which quavered suddenly before the
end.

" No longer than a week," be joked, playing
upon her very heartstrings with the gay, tender
note of his laugh ; " and yet I am fond of them
all. Anything for a woman of the right sort.
The scrapes they got me into, and the scrapes they
got me out of! I love them at first sight. I've
fallen in love with you already, Miss — Bessie's your
name — eh ? "

She backed away a little, and with a trembling
laugh :

" You haven't seen my face yet."

He bent forward gallantly. " A little pale : it
suits some. But you are a fine figure of a girl. Miss
Bessie."

She was all in a flutter. Nobody had ever said
Ko much to her before.

[262]

TO-MORROW

His tone changed. ** I am getting middling
hungry, though. Had no breakfast to-day.
Couldn't you scare up some bread from that tea
for me, or "

She was gone already. He had been on the point
of asking her to let him come inside. No matter.
Anywhere would do. Devil of a iSx ! What would
his chum think?

" I didn't ask you as a beggar," he said, jest-
ingly, taking a piece of bread-and-butter from the
plate she held before him. ^^I asked as a friend.
My dad is rich, you know."

" He starves himself for your sake."

" And I have starved for his whim," he said, tak-
ing up another piece.

" All he has in the world is for you," she
pleaded.

" Yes, if I come here to sit on it like a dam' toad
in a hole. Thank you ; and what about the shovel,
eh? He always had a queer way of showing his
love."

" I could bring him round in a week," she sug-
gested, timidly.

He was too hungry to answer her ; and, holding

[ 868 ]

TO-MORROW
the plate submissively to his hand, she began 1
whisper up to him in a quick, panting voice. He
listened, amazed, eating slower and slower, till at
last his jaws stopped altogether. " That's his
game, is it? " he said, in a rising tone of scathing
contempt. An ungovernable movement of his arm
sent the plate flying out of her fingers. He shot
out a violent curse.

She shrank from him, putting her hand against
the wall.

" No ! " he raged, " He expects ! Expects me
— for his rotten money ! . . . . Who wants his
homeP Mad — not he! Don't you think. He
wants his own way. He wanted to turn me into a
miserable lawyer's clerk, and now he wants to make
of me a blamed tame rabbit in a cage. Of me ! Of
me ! " His subdued angry laugh frightened her
now.

" The whole world ain't a bit too big for me to
spread my elbows in, I can tell you — what's your
name — Bessie — let alone a dam' parlour in a hutch.
Marry ! He wants me to marry and settle ! And
as likely as not he has looked out the girl too —
[261]

TO-MORROW

dash my soul! And do you know the Judy, may
I ask?"

She shook all over with noiseless dry sobs; but
he was fmning and fretting too much to notice her
distress. He bit his thumb with rage at the mere
idea. A window rattled up.

" A grinning, information fellow," pronounced
old Hagberd dogmatically, in measured toneis.
And the sound of his voice seemed to Bessie to make
the night itself mad — ^to pour insanity and dis-
aster on the earth. " Now I know what's wrong
with the people here, my dear. Why, of course!
With this mad chap going about. Don't you have
anything to do with him, Bessie. Bessie, I say ! "

They stood as if dumb. The old man iSdgeted
and mimibled to himself at the window. Suddenly
he cried, piercingly : " Bessie — I see you. I'll tell
Harry."

She made a movement as if to run away, but
stopped and raised her hands to her temples.
Young Hagberd, shadowy and big, stirred no more
than a man of bronze. Over their heads the crazy
night whimpered and scolded in an old man's voice.

[266]

TO-MORROW

*' Send him away, my dear. He's only a vagi
bond. What you want is a good home of your own^
That chap has no home — he's not hke Harry. Htffl
can't be Harry. Harry !s coining to-morrow. Do
you near? One day more," he babbled more ex-
citedly ; " never you fear — Harry shall marry
you."

His voice rose very shrill and mad against the
regular deep soughing of the swell coiling heavily
about the outer face of the sea-wall,

" He will have to. I shall make him, or if not "
— he swore a great oath — " I'll cut him off with a
shilling to-morrow, and leave everything to you.
I shall. To you. Let him starve."

The window rattled down.

Harry drew a deep breath, and took one step
toward Bessie. " So it's yon — the girl," he said,
in a lowered voice. She had not moved, and she re-
mained half turned away from him, pressing the
palms of her hands. " My word ! " he continued,
with an invisible balf-smile on bis lips. " I have a
great mind to stop. . . ."

Her elbows were trembling violently.

" For a week," he finished without a pause.
[866]

TO-MORROW

She clapped her hands to her face.

He came up quite close, and took hold of her
wrists gently. She felt his breath on her ear.

" It's a scrape I am in — this, and it is you that
must see me through." He was trying to uncover
her face. She resisted. He let her go then, and
stepping back a little, " Have you got any
money ? " he asked. " I must be oif now."

She nodded quickly her shamefaced head, and he
waited, looking away from her, while, trembling
all over and bowing her neck, she tried to find the
pocket of her dress.

" Here it is ! " she whispered. " Oh, go away !
go away for God's sake ! If I had more — ^more —
I would give it all to forget — ^to make you for-
get."

He extended his hand. " No fear ! I haven't
forgotten a single one of you in the world. Some
gave me more than money — ^but I am a beggar now
— and you women always had to get me out of my
scrapes."

He swaggered up to the parlour window, and in
the dim light filtering through the blind, looked at
the coin lying in his palm. It was a half-sovereign.

[2671

TO-MOKROW

He slipped it into his pocket. She stood a little on
one side, with her head drooping, as if wounded;
with her anns hanging passive by her side, as if
dead.

" You can't buy me in," he said, " and you can't
buy yourself out."

He set his hat firmly with a little tap, and next
moment she felt herself lifted up in the powerful
embrace of his arms. Her feet lost the ground;
her head hung back ; he showered kisses on her face
with a silent and over- mastering ardour, as if in
haste to get at her very soul. He kissed her pale
cheeks, her hard forehead, her heavy eyelids, her
faded lips; and the measured blows and sighs of
the rising tide accompanied the enfolding power
of his arms, the overwhelming might of his caresses.
It was as if the sea, breaking down the wall pro-
tecting all the homes of the town, had sent a wave
over her head. It passed on ; she staggered back-
wards, with her shoulders against the wall, ex-
hausted, as if she had been stranded there after a
storm and a shipwreck.

She opened her eyes after awhile; and listening

to the firm, leisurely footsteps going away with

[268]

TO-MORROW

their conquest, began to gather her skirts, staring
all the time before her. Suddenly she darted
through the open gate into the dark and deserted
street.

" Stop ! »' she shouted. " Don't go ! ''

And listening with an attentive poise of the head,
she could not tell whether it was the beat of the
swell or his fateful tread that seemed to fall cruelly
upon her heart. Presently every sound grew
fainter, as though she were slowly turning into
stone. A fear of this awful silence came to her —
worse than the fear of death. She called upon her
ebbing strength for the final appeal :

" Harry ! "

Not even the dying echo of a footstep. Noth-
ing. The thimdering of the surf, the voice of the
restless sea itself, seemed stopped. There was not
a sound — ^no whisper of life, as though she were
alone and lost in that stony country of which she
had heard, where madmen go looking for gold and
spurn the find.

Captain Hagberd, inside his dark house, had
kept on the alert. A window ran up; and in the
silence of the stony country a voice spoke above her

[269]

TO-MOHROW

head, high up in the black air — the voice of n
ness, lies and despair — the voice of inextinguis]
able hope. " Is he gone yet — that information
fellow? Do you hear him about, my dear? "

She burst into tears. "Not no! no! I don't
hear Him any more," she sobbed.

He began to chuckle up there triumphantly.
" You frightened him away. Good girl. Now we
shall be all right. Don't you be impatient, my dear.
One day more."

In the other house old Carvil, wallowing regally
in hia arm-chair, with a globe lamp burning by his
side on the table, yelled for her, in a fiendish voice:
" Bessie ! Bessie ! jou Bessie ! "

She heard him at last, and, as if overcome by
fate, began to totter silently back toward her stuffy
little inferno of a cottage. It had no lofty portal,
no terrific inscription of forfeited hopes — she did
not understand wherein she had sinned.

Captain Hagberd had gradually worked himself
into a state of noisy happiness up there.

" Go in I Keep quiet ! " she turned upon him
tearfully, from the doorstep below.

He rebelled against her authority in his great
[270]

TO-MORROW

joy at having got rid at last of that ^^ something
wrong." It was as if all the hopeful madness of the
world had broken out to bring terror upon her
heart, with the voice of that old man shouting of
his trust in an everlasting to-morrow.

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[871]

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